face heightened legal and regulatory scrutiny for potential anticompetitive practices and amid the continued fallout from the abuse of social platforms by foreign actors ahead of the 2016 election.
While the former president didn't weigh in on the antitrust debate, he did offer a personal anecdote about how smartphones have been great for keeping in touch with his two daughters, who are now in college, and connecting society at large even though there's a broader crisis in how social media is dividing people and leading to loneliness.One area where he sees tremendous potential for technology is in health care and reducing the inefficiencies in the system.
And we should be investing in solutions to use that money more efficiently so we're both less sick and have more capital to spend elsewhere. "Almost our entire federal deficit, at least when I was president, can be accounted for by what we spend on health care versus what other industrialized nations spend on health care," Obama said.
"That's all money that could be used for early childhood education and rebuilding roads and bridges an cleaning our water and putting young people back to work. Those are wasted resources that I think big data can really capture in a powerful way, but it does require some guardrails and thinking through what the framework is to protect patient privacy."