Part of a debate happening in the Junior Doctor’s Contract group about human empathy and AI. Here’s something I shared that I hope will be of value (particularly the last 3 paragraphs)
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Doctor’s comment: there will be a place for AI but it will never fully make human drs redundant. Ultimately decisions regarding best interests will need to be made and just because something has been found doesn’t mean anything needs doing about it etc. A large part of medicine is about human empathy, difficult to artificially create that.
My response:
Thanks for pointing this out Jamie, as it further underscores the dangers that unprepared Doctors are facing. I agree with you that human empathy is at the heart of medicine. But I disagree that empathy is difficult to artificially create, given that stressed, overworked, sleep deprived Medics have to artificially create empathy all the time. We don’t feel like being empathetic all the time. And in those moments, the techniques we use to create an empathetic connection with a patient are easily replicated by the current state of AI-powered robot doctors…robot doctors that don’t get tired or stressed.
And when you consider an entire generation of patients being trained to emotionally engage with search engines, Alexa, Siri and even AI-powered sex robots (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2018/09/25/prediction-sex-robots-are-the-most-disruptive-technology-we-didnt-see-coming/#61437b3b6a56)…interacting with an attentive, caring robot unit when you’re unwell isn’t hard to imagine.
Even with this reality upon us, your point about human empathy is vital. Human empathy is the only real value proposition that Medics have to offer…and they’re competing with AI-robots in delivering it.
But when you consider how the current healthcare system is systematically stripping Medics of their empathy for their patients, Doctors need to make radical changes to guard their ability to empathise with other human beings at all costs…to avoid becoming collateral damage of progress.
I think one way of doing this is for Medics to reinvent themselves and find ways to express their full range of talents, whether or not they can figure out a way to integrate them into the current healthcare system.
Writers, musicians, dancers, painters, coders, YouTubers, video gamers…Medics should explore ways to work in these areas, and even get paid for doing the other things that they love.
Once Medics are financially and emotionally independent of the healthcare system, they’re then free to engage with it from a position of generosity, empathy and inventiveness that will complement and direct the progress of AI technology in medicine.
Thoughts? 🙂