A technological imperative is just one of many conceptual tools (e.g., economic, preventive, and epidemiological) that offer a convenient framework for considering the health care realm. Readers of Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris may recall his vivid characterization of the hunchback Quasimodo. It is less likely, however, that there will be any similar recollection of a depiction in the book of cathedral archdeacon Claude Frollo, whose famous slogan was “Ceci tuera cela” (This will kill that), which occurred to him as he touches a printed book while glancing nostalgically at the church towers. “This” (signifies the book), while “that” (represents the medieval cathedral and the entire world it symbolizes).

What Frollo had in mind is the disruptive potential of technological innovations. The invention of the printing press meant that the flock of spiritual followers no longer would have to rely exclusively on clerical proclamations to discover and interpret information, which heretofore would have remained unknown to them. As noted in the book, Creative Economy and Culture: Challenges, Changes and Futures for the Creative Industries, a chapter on Ceci tuera cela points out that democratic, secular print culture would supersede the authority of the church, along with the system of beliefs and images embodied in the great edifice where action is portrayed.

It appears reasonably clear that a constant array of technological innovations has the potential to have a transformative influence on the health care sphere. Many new developments are intended as improvements. Nonetheless, it is the unintended negative consequences of various changes to the existing order that sometimes prove to be worrisome challenges due to the prospect that technological advances often bring in their wake many impacts of a mixed blessings nature.

February 2019 marked the 10th anniversary of passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, an effort to accelerate the conversion of physician and hospital paper charts to electronic records, but widespread adoption not always has been accompanied by projected benefits. Instead, EMRs are associated with the onset of physician “burnout” and also in disrupting effective communication patterns between clinicians and their patients. Moreover, a finding reported in the November 2019 issue of the journal Health Affairs indicated that while hospitals gave 95% of discharged patients access to view, download, and transmit their information, only about 10% of those with access used it. Underuse can produce its own train of undesirable side effects.

As more applications are integrated into everyday life, artificial intelligence (AI) is predicted to have a globally transformative influence on economic and social structures similar to the effect that other general‐purpose technologies, such as electricity have had. A manuscript in the November 2019 issue of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine introduces a cautionary note, however, regarding key issues for occupational safety and health, along with selected implications that include job displacement from automation and management of human‐machine interactions. Hence, as technology unfolds, it continues to warrant close scrutiny.

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