Can a physics major survive the AI era? Why did two students with identical AI-assisted assignments deserve different grades? And when AI gets a body — even one as small as a wristband tag — who decides its limits? These are not quick reads. Each essay is short, but built to be read slowly and returned to.
In twenty-nine short essays, public health professor Min Wu, PhD, works through the questions AI is raising for students, educators, practitioners, and anyone who serves communities. Each essay begins with an everyday case — a soccer game moved two hours for the heat, a flooded basement, a used car with a hidden accident, a pole vault on a construction-site sand pile — and follows it to a clear idea about AI in public health.
The book moves in three parts:
Building a Mind — choosing a major, learning with AI, and why expertise matters more with AI, not less.
Who Decides the Limit — inherited bias, selective forgetting, dignity, simulation, and the limits set before you ask.
When AI Gets a Body — heat, floods, home-care robots, and a tag that reaches people instead of ranking them.
Written with a physicist's eye for structure and a public health professor's concern for real people, these essays offer frameworks that outlast any particular tool.
For students weighing their futures, educators rethinking assignments, public health and health administration professionals adopting AI, and parents trying to give good advice.
The essays first appeared at ai-public-health.com and have been revised for this collection. Min Wu is also the author of the Springer textbook Artificial Intelligence in Public Health (2026).
