Will the perfect storm of potentially life-changing, artificial intelligence-driven health care and the desire to increase profits through subscription models alienate vulnerable patients?

For the third year in a row, MIT's Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize asked students to describe, in 3,000 words or fewer, how advancements in computing could shape human society for the better or worse. All entries were eligible to win a number of cash prizes.
 
Inspired by recent research on the greater effect microbiomes have on overall health, MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering PhD candidate Annaliese Meyer created the concept of “B-Bots,” a synthetic bacterial mimic designed to regulate gut biomes and activated by Bluetooth.  
 
For the contest, which challenges MIT students to articulate their musings for what a future driven by advances in computing holds, Meyer submitted a work of speculative fiction about how recipients of a revolutionary new health-care technology find their treatment in jeopardy with the introduction of a subscription-based pay model.

In her winning paper, titled “(Pre/Sub)scribe,” Meyer chronicles the usage of B-Bots from the perspective of both their creator and a B-Bots user named Briar. They celebrate the effects of the supplement, helping them manage vitamin deficiencies and chronic conditions like acid reflux and irritable bowel syndrome. Meyer says that the introduction of a B-Bots subscription model “seemed like a perfect opportunity to hopefully make clear that in a for-profit health-care system, even medical advances that would, in theory, be revolutionary for human health can end up causing more harm than good for the many people on the losing side of the massive wealth disparity in modern society.”