Today, a great piece by Dr. Clay Johnston (Dean of the UT Dell Medical School) popped up in my email called Today's Doctors Are an Endangered Species. It's a great blog post that I recommend everyone take a look at. In it, Dr. Johnston talks about how AI is going to eventually be a full replacement for the way physicians practice medicine today, but that it doesn't necessarily mean the end of human-practiced medicine. In fact, physicians' ability to communicate with patients will become more crucial than ever, as the more tedious jobs of diagnosis and prescription move into the realm of AI.
I think he's right about the way in which AI will eventually transform medicine, and I think the same sort of transformation will happen in many sectors. Heavily specialized fields like medicine, law, engineering, and even science itself will be some of the last fields transformed by artificial intelligence. Regardless of whether the AI tool used is deep learning or something that has not yet hit the mainstream, the transformation will happen, and it will hand the heavily methodical, procedural tasks of these fields off to the computer.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it opens up the practitioners in these fields to focus on the things that AI will likely never be able to do. AI will never provide the human touch that is so desperately desired by medical patients; it will never provide the out-of-the-box thinking that can help keep an innocent person from going to prison. In engineering and the sciences, AI may one day be able to produce evolutionary progress without human involvement, but it will never be able to produce revolutionary breakthroughs.
In the end, AI will give humans the time necessary to empathize, create, be inspired, and ultimately stretch the limits of human knowledge, ability, and consciousness. Like the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago, the AI revolution will give humanity the one thing that truly allows us to grow as a species: free time. The agricultural revolution freed us from endless hunting and gathering, and allowed us to create astrology/astronomy, mathematics, language, and civilization. The industrial revolution freed us from constant farming, allowing for the growth of cities and the development of automobiles, complex scientific instruments, quantum physics, and the computer itself. What will the AI revolution bring about, now that we will have even more free time to explore the wonders possible with human ingenuity and creativity? I'm excited to find out.
Let me know what your thoughts are by leaving a comment or connecting with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
I think he's right about the way in which AI will eventually transform medicine, and I think the same sort of transformation will happen in many sectors. Heavily specialized fields like medicine, law, engineering, and even science itself will be some of the last fields transformed by artificial intelligence. Regardless of whether the AI tool used is deep learning or something that has not yet hit the mainstream, the transformation will happen, and it will hand the heavily methodical, procedural tasks of these fields off to the computer.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it opens up the practitioners in these fields to focus on the things that AI will likely never be able to do. AI will never provide the human touch that is so desperately desired by medical patients; it will never provide the out-of-the-box thinking that can help keep an innocent person from going to prison. In engineering and the sciences, AI may one day be able to produce evolutionary progress without human involvement, but it will never be able to produce revolutionary breakthroughs.
In the end, AI will give humans the time necessary to empathize, create, be inspired, and ultimately stretch the limits of human knowledge, ability, and consciousness. Like the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago, the AI revolution will give humanity the one thing that truly allows us to grow as a species: free time. The agricultural revolution freed us from endless hunting and gathering, and allowed us to create astrology/astronomy, mathematics, language, and civilization. The industrial revolution freed us from constant farming, allowing for the growth of cities and the development of automobiles, complex scientific instruments, quantum physics, and the computer itself. What will the AI revolution bring about, now that we will have even more free time to explore the wonders possible with human ingenuity and creativity? I'm excited to find out.
Let me know what your thoughts are by leaving a comment or connecting with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.