In this blog post, we will look at whether artificial intelligence can replace the role of a doctor and how the role of a doctor will change in the future.
In 2016, the world once again expressed awe at the capabilities of artificial intelligence. In the world’s most difficult board game, Go, an AI beat the world’s No. 1 Go champion, Lee Sedol. AI had already defeated humans in chess and trivia, but Go was still considered the last bastion of the human race. However, this result shocked many people. For this reason, for a while, stories related to artificial intelligence have been all over the world. The changes in the future society due to the development of artificial intelligence have been featured in the news, the importance of coding education has been emphasized in the education sector, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution has been a recurring topic in the political arena. In the wake of this, discussions about the future of medicine due to the development of artificial intelligence have also frequently appeared in the medical sector for a while. IBM of the United States actually developed Watson in this regard. Watson makes accurate and quick decisions and is penetrating deep into the medical community, so many gloomy predictions have been made about the profession of doctor both inside and outside the medical community. So, will the profession of doctor disappear in the future as artificial intelligence advances? If it doesn’t disappear, what will the doctor of the future look like?
Before we look into this, let’s take a look at how far artificial intelligence has come in the medical field. Let’s take a look at the current status of artificial intelligence by looking at the example of Watson, which is currently a hot topic in medicine. Watson is already being used in several hospitals. Watson is a case-based artificial intelligence diagnostic method developed by IBM, which is not yet as accurate as humans, but it shows overwhelming speed in terms of the time it takes to make a decision. This is because if a general doctor can read about five papers a day, Watson can read over ten thousand papers in a few minutes. It accumulates the knowledge gained from the papers and also accumulates a large number of patient cases to relate the patient’s symptoms and diagnose the disease, which is the same method used by doctors. In fact, some hospitals have been using Watson since 2016. Watson has the disadvantage of being less accurate for Asians because it is a technology created in the West, but there are actually cases where Watson has been used to save patients. However, it is still not at the level where Watson can be relied on to diagnose diseases, and it is still in the research stage. Currently, it is only used to check whether the conclusions made by the medical staff match those made by Watson. Even Watson’s accuracy is less than 90% for the five major cancers. This deep learning technology is still in its infancy and has only recently won board games such as Go, so it will take several years before it can be properly used in medicine.
With artificial intelligence now at this level in the medical field, why is the future of medicine seen as bleak because of artificial intelligence? The answer can be found by referring to Yuval Noah Harari’s “Homo Deus.” The author focuses on the role of doctors, arguing that doctors’ main role is to properly diagnose diseases and suggest the best treatment, and that this role will eventually be replaced by artificial intelligence. In fact, AI can read far more papers than doctors and can make diagnoses quickly and accurately without making any mistakes. In addition, considering the enormous amount of time and money it takes to train a single doctor, some predict that the role of doctors will be further reduced. Therefore, even if doctors are not completely replaced by AI, the number of doctors is expected to decrease sharply. In fact, this kind of concern has been raised for a long time. When doctors are broadly divided into surgeons and internists, in the case of surgeons, the development of surgical equipment such as DaVinci Surgical has already shown that machines are superior to the hands of human doctors. In the case of internists, if diagnostic programs such as Watson are further developed, doctors may no longer be needed.
So, will doctors really be replaced by artificial intelligence? I don’t think doctors will be replaced by artificial intelligence. There are two reasons for my belief.
The first reason is that artificial intelligence cannot make a perfect diagnosis for all diseases. Of course, it is true that the accuracy rate for the five major cancers has reached 90% using technologies such as Watson. However, there are dozens of types of cancer alone, and there are countless diseases other than cancer. Although AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go, AlphaGo was programmed solely for Go. What would happen if AlphaGo were given a new board game to play? Of course, it could build an algorithm if it were trained thousands or tens of thousands of times, just like Go, but until then, it would lose to humans. For AlphaGo, a new disease is the same as a new board game. To know the “rules” of this disease, we would need a lot of cases, but there is no data because it is a new disease. Of course, doctors are vulnerable to new diseases. But that is why doctors can conduct research on new diseases, develop antibiotics or vaccines, or identify the causes of the disease and take preventive measures. Humans can do more than artificial intelligence. Of course, artificial intelligence will be able to make clearer and faster diagnoses than humans for common diseases. But there is no need to worry about this at all. Artificial intelligence was developed to help humans in the first place, so doctors can also take advantage of its help when diagnosing diseases. When the DaVinci Surgical robot was introduced in surgical operations, many surgeons were worried that they would be replaced by robots. However, in the end, only doctors can operate the DaVinci Surgical, and currently, surgeons use the DaVinci Surgical as a “helper” when performing delicate operations. The same goes for Watson. Watson may be able to diagnose diseases better than humans and suggest appropriate treatments in the future, but it is doctors who input patient data and create the papers that Watson references. Decades from now, Watson will still be on doctors’ desks, helping them diagnose patients.
The second reason is that we need to rethink the role of doctors. When people outside the medical community think of a doctor, they probably imagine a doctor in a white coat examining a patient or operating on a patient in scrubs. But this is only one side of the doctor. When patients are sick, the people they trust the most are their doctors. That is why doctors should treat their patients with extra care and be able to inspire trust in them when they go on rounds. This belief is deeply rooted in people’s hearts. So, would putting a white coat on a machine make us trust that machine? This topic is controversial, but the belief does not disappear easily, as many people still believe in creationism and visit churches every Sunday even after the theory of evolution was proposed and the Big Bang theory was presented. Similarly, even if artificial intelligence replaces doctors in the diagnostic role, the profession of doctor will remain symbolic. Moreover, the position of doctors in society is important, and doctors play an important role in determining health policies and coordinating health insurance. The role of doctors is not limited to hospitals. Artificial intelligence cannot replace the role of doctors in this regard. Doctors also share new treatments and research through academic societies. Of course, Watson around the world can read all the papers as long as they are connected to the Internet, but the people who write these papers are doctors after all, and it is the doctors who decide the direction of future research. Therefore, this academic exchange will continue.
Of course, there may be objections. If, in the distant future, artificial intelligence becomes much more advanced than it is now and is more creative than humans, and is able to study diseases and write papers, then the role of a doctor will not really be necessary. There is also the argument that if artificial intelligence replaces the ability to communicate with patients, doctors may eventually be replaced in all aspects. For example, in the movie Her, which was released in 2014, an artificial intelligence with human emotions appears, and we can see people forming deeper relationships with artificial intelligence than with humans. As artificial intelligence advances in the future, it is predicted that artificial intelligence may be able to communicate better with patients than human doctors, and doctors may no longer be needed.
However, such discussions paint an overly pessimistic picture of the future. Even during the Industrial Revolution, there were concerns that machines would replace humans, but as automation progressed, people found new jobs and a new field, the service industry, was created. The same is true for artificial intelligence. At the current rate of AI development, it is unlikely that AI will take over the service industry within a few years, but even if that day comes, there is no need to worry too much. Just as people couldn’t have predicted the various jobs of the 21st century in the past, we cannot accurately predict the jobs of the future. The same goes for doctors. Of course, doctors of the future will look different from what they do now. But this is something that can be seen by comparing doctors from 200 years ago with those of today. Just 200 years ago, doctors were more like shamans than healers. There was no concept of hygiene, and people believed that if they got sick, they could get better by drawing blood. Could people at that time imagine the doctors of today? Also, just 30 years ago, there was no concept of clinical trials as we know it today. At that time, case reports were all that was available, and doctors with a lot of experience had an advantage. Could people at that time imagine the doctors of today? Similarly, the development of artificial intelligence does not mean that there will no longer be people who cure diseases. If there are people who are sick, there will be people who cure them. It is impossible to predict exactly how doctors will coexist with artificial intelligence in the future, but it is an overreaching assumption to think that the profession of doctor will disappear due to artificial intelligence. Even if artificial intelligence has better communication skills than humans, doctors will still have another role to play.
Yoram Harari’s “Homo Deus” discusses the special nature of the profession of doctor and the possibility of replacement by artificial intelligence because many people are concerned about job loss due to the development of artificial intelligence. Of course, there will be some jobs that will disappear completely due to artificial intelligence. However, the development of artificial intelligence will mean the birth of new job categories in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We must endure this transition period well and respond flexibly. In the end, I want to say that the future does not have to be so bleak because of artificial intelligence. Of course, this is my personal opinion, but at least the current discussion on artificial intelligence is overheated, and the future we live in will not be so bleak. Rather, I think that artificial intelligence will make our lives more affluent and help us build a stable society.
