What does artificial intelligence
quietly do to ordinary human
relationships?
I am a medical doctor and health informatician working at the intersection of medicine, technology, and public health in Sri Lanka. My work focuses on building digital health systems that serve communities — not just institutions.
I work in public health information systems and digital health program development, and I hold qualifications in MBBS, MCGP, and MSc Biomedical Informatics. I am currently an MD Trainee in Health Informatics at the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo.
In 2026 I published my first book — Are You Still Human? — a short literary nonfiction work about what artificial intelligence quietly does to ordinary human relationships.
Are You Still Human? — A short literary nonfiction
Not the kind of shift that happens in a hospital ward — the kind that happens slowly, over years, in ordinary places. What happens when effective habits from the digital world begin to bleed into the parts of life where those habits do not belong?
Ten patterns. Three stories. Thirty-seven pages. Written for people who build intelligent systems, and for people who simply live alongside them — which is, increasingly, everyone.
Quiet shifts that extended AI exposure tends to produce in human thinking
The practised habit of reducing everything to what can be processed, evaluated, and acted upon in minimal time.
Adopting the output certainty of machine systems into human communication where uncertainty is actually appropriate.
Framing human attention as a finite resource to be allocated rather than a presence to be given.
Pre-emptively editing what is 'worth' responding to — before fully receiving it.
Calculating the return on investment of human relationships as if they were processes to be improved.
An inability to tolerate ambiguity or partial information — a need to resolve rather than hold.
The disappearance of the productive gap between experience and response — the space where meaning forms.
Optimisation habits learned at work that quietly teach the brain to pre-empt emotional processing.
Interacting with people as if they were systems to be queried — looking for the right input to generate the desired output.
The possibility — and the practice — of noticing where these patterns have arrived, and deciding whether to keep them.
What readers are saying about the book
"This short book made me sit with something I had been noticing but not naming. Quietly powerful."
"I build AI systems for a living. I didn't expect a 37-page book to make me reconsider what I was building them for."
"A rare thing: a book about technology that is actually about people. Honest and precise."
The three opening stories from the book — and the questions they left
He sees an old friend at a gate and begins, without meaning to, to calculate whether he has time for this. The problem is that he has enough time. What he is calculating is something else.
Human Relationship Read the storyMid-conversation, he notices he is prompting his own son the way he prompts an AI system — looking for the right input to produce the desired output. His son says eight words his father does not forget.
Family Read the storyShe cannot locate her grief. She wonders, very quietly, whether ten years of optimising everything at work has taught her brain to pre-empt it.
Grief & Feeling Read the storyObservations from the intersection of medicine, technology, and living
When you have learned to process information at machine speed, the clinical pause — the one where the patient is still deciding whether to tell you something — becomes very hard to hold.
After years of building health data systems, I noticed what gets lost when a patient becomes a data point — and what it takes to design against that loss.
Writing, for me, is the place where I process what the data cannot hold. It is the part of medicine and technology that happens in language instead of numbers.
Selected projects in health information systems and digital public health
Real-time communicable disease surveillance platform with anomaly detection and early-warning alerts.
Mobile-first field tool for flood and disaster response teams — offline-capable with reconnect sync.
Progressive Web App to visualise district-level health statistics — works offline, no training required.
Data management and reporting dashboard for tracking displaced populations during disaster events.
Patient registration and screening workflow system — designed for clinic staff with minimal IT background.
Vehicle management system for public health field operations — allocation, maintenance, and scheduling.
For speaking, collaboration, media, and conversation
Whether you'd like to discuss the book, invite me to speak, collaborate on digital health work, or simply respond to something you read here — I'd love to hear from you.
Or write directly: tjeevaraj78@gmail.com