Artificial intelligence is coming to medicine — don’t be afraid Posted on : Aug 19 - 2017

Automation could replace one-third of U.S. jobs within 15 years. Oxford and Yale experts recently predicted that artificial intelligence could outperform humans in a variety of tasks by 2045, ranging from writing novels to performing surgery and driving vehicles. A little human rage would be a natural response to such unsettling news.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is bringing us to the precipice of an enormous societal shift. We are collectively worrying about what it will mean for people. As a doctor, I’m naturally drawn to thinking about AI’s impact on the practice of medicine. I’ve decided to welcome the coming revolution, believing that it offers a wonderful opportunity for increases in productivity that will transform health care to benefit everyone.

Groundbreaking AI models have bested humans in complex reasoning games, like the recent victory of Google’s AlphaGo AI over the human Go champ. What does that mean for medicine?

To date, most AI solutions have solved minor human issues — playing a game or helping order a box of detergent. The innovations need to matter more. The true breakthroughs and potential of AI lie in real advancements in human productivity. A McKinsey Global Institute report suggests that AI is helping us approach an unparalleled expansion in productivity that will yield five times the increase introduced by the steam engine and about 1 1/2 times the improvements we’ve seen from robotics and computers combined. We simply don’t have a mental model to comprehend the potential of AI.

Across all industries, an estimated 60 percent of jobs will have 30 percent of their activities automated; about 5 percent of jobs will be 100 percent automated.

What this means for health care is murky right now. Does that 5 percent include doctors? After all, medicine is a series of data points of a knowable nature with clear treatment pathways that could be automated. That premise, though, fantastically overstates and misjudges the capabilities of AI and dangerously oversimplifies the complexity underpinning what physicians do. Realistically, AI will perform many discrete tasks better than humans can which, in turn, will free physicians to focus on accomplishing higher-order tasks.

If you break down the patient-physician interaction, its complexity is immediately obvious. Requirements include empathy, information management, application of expertise in a given context, negotiation with multiple stakeholders, and unpredictable physical response (think of surgery), often with a life on the line. These are not AI-applicable functions.

I mentioned AlphaGo AI beating human experts at the game. The reason this feat was so impressive is due to the high branching factor and complexity of the Go game tree — there are an estimated 250 choices per move, permitting estimates of 10 to the 170th different game outcomes. By comparison, chess has a branching factor of 35, with 10 to the 47th different possible game outcomes. Medicine, with its infinite number of “moves” and outcomes, is decades away from medical approaches safely managed by machines alone. View More