If A.I. Can Diagnose Patients, What Are Doctors For?

“Learning how to deploy A.I. in the medical field, Rodman told me later, will require a science of its own. Last year, he co-authored a study in which some doctors solved cases with help from ChatGPT. They performed no better than doctors who didn’t use the chatbot. The chatbot alone, however, solved the cases more accurately than the humans.”

A couple decades ago, the same study was done with chess grandmasters and chess programs. The chess programs + grandmasters scored worse than the chess programs alone.

Automated decision systems will probably have better margins of error, but who’s responsible for misdiagnosis or miscommunication? It won’t be fair to apply the entire burden of a mistake on a doctor if the tools they’re being advised to use are also fallible. A new insurance model will likely result from increased AI use in medical settings, one where developers and deployers may have to share some liability. Why shouldn’t that be the case?