When Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, reflects on the extent to which healthcare jobs will be disrupted by artificial intelligence, he recalls an apocalyptic speech given by the British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton.
Hinton sent shockwaves through specialist medical education with his warning in 2016: “We should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that, within five years, deep learning is going to do better.”
The technology seemed so good that it would soon replace humans. But the reality has been rather different. Beyond a few applications — for example, in mammography and colonoscopy — evidence of AI’s superiority over doctors remains thin. Human intervention is still essential.