{"id":875169,"date":"2026-08-29T00:22:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T00:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/875169\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T00:22:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T00:22:17","slug":"ai-has-human-doctors-asking-whats-left-for-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/875169\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Has Human Doctors Asking: What\u2019s Left for Us?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don\u2019t be fooled by the question mark in the title of an article published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. When the authors, including medical superstar Ezekiel Emanuel and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, asked, \u201cWill Autonomous AI Exceed AI-Physicians as the Best Medical Care?<\/a>\u201d they were being rhetorical. Their answer is an emphatic YES. Many in the medical world are begrudgingly coming to terms with the premise that patients can get the best treatment by a hybrid approach<\/a> where doctors work in consultation with well-trained bots. But this article\u2019s thesis is that AI alone can deliver the best outcomes.<\/p>\n

\u201cReview of all published articles on AI in medicine since January 1, 2024, shows that medicine is rapidly approaching the transition point at which AI alone will exceed physicians and physician AI-hybrids in providing the best care at five fundamental medical tasks,\u201d they write. Those tasks include taking medical histories, establishing a diagnosis<\/a>, identifying what tests are needed, prescribing treatment<\/a>, and managing chronic diseases. You know, doctoring. AI is now so good, they argue, that clinicians should refrain from meddling, because \u201chumans in the loop degrade AI performance.\u201d Stand back, doc, and let AI do its thing. Which used to be your thing.<\/p>\n

Lead author Emanuel\u2014brother of Ari and Rahm, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Penn and a renowned oncologist\u2014told me that for many years, he\u2019d dismissed the idea that AI could perform core medical functions. He would run into Khosla at conferences in the 2010s, and the VC would bend his ear about how AI would be doing 85 percent of what doctors did by 2035. It was a hobbyhorse Khosla had been riding for years, writing a 2012 piece in TechCrunch<\/a> asking, \u201cDo We Need Doctors or Algorithms?\u201d(again, rhetorical) and penning a 101-page treatise<\/a> in 2016 to that effect. \u201cI said bullshit, there\u2019s no way,\u201d says Emanuel. \u201cWhat doctors do is too complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

But about a year ago, Emanuel\u2019s friend Robert Wachter sent him galleys of his book A Giant Leap, where Wachter, who is head of medicine at UCSF, outlined a world where first-class medicine would be a collaborative process between AI and doctors, but the masses in \u201ceconomy class\u201d would mostly make do with AI alone. Emanuel began to think that Khosla might be right. He suddenly flashed on a frightening question: \u201cIf AI takes over, what\u2019s left for doctors to do?\u201d<\/p>\n

First he needed to validate the premise. He asked Khosla to collaborate, and the VC suggested that his son Neal Khosla join the effort, along with Emanuel\u2019s researcher. Neal runs Curai Health<\/a>, an online company that uses AI to treat patients, with a staff of doctors to prescribe medicine and handle more complicated issues. (This conflict of interest is disclosed in the paper, along with Vinod Khosla\u2019s relevant investments and Emanuel\u2019s various grants and consultancies.) The coauthors set out to look at all the studies on AI medicine that they could find from January 2024 to the present and concluded that, in many cases, a \u201csuperior autonomous AI\u201d will likely surpass humans using AI by 2030. That prediction, they admit, is \u201cunsettling but seems probable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unsettling is an understatement. One of the loudest dissenting voices is John Whyte, CEO of the American Medical Association, which represents all those doctors who will be worrying about what\u2019s left. When I talked to him, Whyte began by noting what he saw as the paper\u2019s shortcomings, including that some of the studies it surveyed are simulations, not blind experiments, and they don\u2019t all support<\/a> the article\u2019s conclusion. Notably, a February 2026 Nature article<\/a> found that in real-life cases, most patients were unable to effectively converse with large language models to access their expertise. Whyte unsurprisingly bristled at the idea of removing humans from the clinical loop. \u201cThe AMA does see the potential in these tools, but they have to be utilized in the context of a care plan that\u2019s governed by a physician,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t be fooled by the question mark in the title of an article published this month in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":875170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,75187,49,48,1056,124,1058,61],"class_list":["post-875169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-backchannel-nl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-doctors","tag-jobs","tag-medicine","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/875170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}