Embracing The Technological Renaissance in Medicine—With Careful Optimism

With the recent and consistent spur of artificial intelligence technologies, the medical community cannot help but ponder about what their futures will hold with newer, more powerful AI models, like ChatGPT, assisting them. Coursera defines artificial intelligence as “computer systems capable of performing tasks that historically required human intelligence.” Naturally, many professionals also ask a common question when thinking about AI: “How long until it replaces us?” That point is important to address. In the world of healthcare I see humans and tech as having intertwined roles, with AI providing assistance with parts of patient care like diagnoses, surgical procedures, patient data organization, and more (For a deeper dive into everything AI provides the medical industry, see nejm.org below). Nonetheless, I don’t think we’ll likely see a world where robots do everything for us too soon. Future physicians, including you future surgeons reading this, may have once considered your jobs being fully automated with machinery. But despite its vast coverage and seemingly near-perfect execution, relying solely on artificial intelligence is dangerous. It can potentially be destructive at the height of society’s rising demand for excellent medical care.

Artificial intelligence models lack the creativity and empathy that humans have developed across thousands of years of our evolution. As efficient as AI is at accomplishing semi-repetitive tasks requiring high-level and in-depth analysis, its knowledge is limited to what’s inside its database and the information it can directly derive from that. Humans can do a 180 away from their course, but AI isn’t able to propose new procedures when the only things it knows how to do can’t work. If AI is in charge of an operating room and a tricky situation arises, it could very well fail to accomplish its task—and harm the patient in the process. Bedside manner is another crucial aspect of healthcare that AI can’t quite replicate. For a patient, it doesn’t really match the feeling of comfort created when speaking with a person about one’s health and future. Even as useful as it is, it’s difficult to imagine a world with AI taking over human jobs. So with all that in mind, what actually are other benefits of AI in medicine?

As of the present, we’ve seen the work of artificial intelligence as robots performing surgery. Though this may seem fully automated, the robot cannot come up with new ideas like humans can and requires a database to know what to do next, so they’re always overseen by professionals. In the upcoming years, we can expect to see more of this, where machines aren’t necessarily replacing doctors but instead help by complementing their work. A less acknowledged benefit of AI in healthcare is also that in low-resource settings and underdeveloped countries, it’ll allow more people to be treated due to its efficiency. It tends to take less time for a robot made exclusively to execute a precise set of instructions to do the job than a human.

I understand that the rapid growth of AI seems scary at first glance. It seems to pose a threat to the work that we all do, and has arrived so fast that it can appear to be impossible for us to adapt just as quickly. But there’s no consistently safe method of completely relying on just it for healthcare yet, and there likely won’t be for many years to come. Beloved and respected surgeons and healthcare specialists are safe, and the further advancement of artificial intelligence will help to accelerate these careers. So as we move into this new age of AI, we need to learn to work with it. AI isn’t a threat to us, it’s our new partner. Rather than ignoring it due to the risk it may pose, we need to learn to control that risk and welcome its valuable uses.

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Embracing The Technological Renaissance in Medicine—With Careful Optimism

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