It’s coming for me

Let me start by saying that I feel privileged to be alive right now, to witness everything that has happened so far with AI, and barring any untimely accidents (knock on wood), the even more exciting things to come in the next few months and years that I truly believe are going to transform our society and our world.

I am not an accelerationist, with a half cocked mentality that just because humanity is troubled that AGI—>ASI should be hastened guard rails be damned. Nor am I a doomer, gloomily resigned to a certain future terminators, paper clips, and battery pods.

That being said, the end is near. For career that is, at least for my job as I know it, and while I don’t know what that means for me personally (or my colleagues), I can’t help but see it as a net good for humanity.

You see, I am a physician, and a damned good one too, if I do say so myself (and I do!). But as “good” as I may be, on my best day, it would be disingenuous of me suggest that I know more than AI about, well, anything.

If you have been to see your doctor in the past year, you have probably see them using AI in a couple of ways so far, asking your permission for AI to listen and document the encounter, and then possible also using a resource called Open Evidence to double check their assessment and come up with next steps. At least they should be doing that second step for anything that is not 100% straight forward.

If you are paying attention, what I have just described is a middle man, someone connecting two bots, the data collection bot, and the data analysis bot. And yes in this scenario the doctor is still driving the encounter, asking the right questions and then relaying the answers in a relatable way to the patient, but let’s be honest, those are things that AI can do just as well.

The time will come, and it won’t take long in coming, where a unified multimodal AI agent can do all of those steps autonomously, and better than today’s doctors.

It will do so with infinite patience, without prejudice, and better clinical judgement.

So, while this AI revolution will leave me without a job, it will be better medical care for patients, and that is not something I can resent too much, because better is better, and when it comes to health, I want better for everyone and I am not so short sighted as to want to preserve my career at the expense of this improvement.