Will artificial intelligence replace doctors? - Harvard Health (2024)

FAQs

Will artificial intelligence replace doctors? - Harvard Health? ›

Ask the doctor

The “future” of medicine is not an either-or between humans and machines. It's a collaborative future where doctors, data and AI work in tandem, bringing out the best in each other. As we move forward, it's crucial for the medical community to recognize that machines won't replace them.

The AI system matched or surpassed the physicians' diagnostic accuracy in all six medical specialties considered.

A new AI tool that uses an online finger-tapping test outperformed primary care physicians when assessing the severity of Parkinson's disease. JAMA Ophthalmology reported in 2024 that a chatbot outperformed glaucoma specialists and matched retina specialists in diagnostic and treatment accuracy.

Doctors and scientists see AI's promise as a key diagnostic tool that can catch cancer and other deadly diseases sooner, giving people more time for treatment and potentially saving lives. The US Food and Drug Administration has cleared AI for many medical uses.

Some Tasks Are Impossible for Robots and Algorithms

Computers are incapable of the intuitive reasoning physicians employ when evaluating information from multiple sources to make a diagnosis and create a treatment plan.

One consensus estimates 25 years. Maybe less. I believe that AI will perform all three main functions of physicians, the first of which is determining a diagnosis and medical treatment; collecting and analyzing data; and then making recommendations on further testing and treatment. Most of this can be done now.

Brand-new technology will continue to impact the healthcare industry. And so far, none of these developments indicate that doctors will soon be obsolete. However, constant innovation and technological inventions will introduce more automation, high-tech machinery, and robotics to the industry.

Artificial intelligence (AI) affects 100% of physicians and other health care providers, but three out of four patients do not trust AI in a health care setting. AI has become ubiquitous in health care, but a new survey found nearly 80% of patients don't know if their doctor is using it or not.

Image-intensive specialties like radiology, pathology, and dermatology may be taken over by AI computer vision and convoluted neural networks.

Will AI eventually replace doctors or nurses? ›

AI is not intended to replace healthcare professionals. Instead, AI serves as a valuable tool in supporting and augmenting their abilities. The future of healthcare lies in a delicate balance between innovation and human interaction.

Patients will lose empathy, kindness, and appropriate behavior when dealing with robotic physicians and nurses because these robots do not possess human attributes such as compassion. This is one of the most significant negative aspects of artificial intelligence in medical science.

Model re-training improved the AI's performance, increasing diagnostic accuracy from 96.6 to 98.0 percent.

Data privacy and security risks through the generation of vast amounts of sensitive patient data. Bias and fairness concerns in training data that may lead to unequal treatment, misdiagnosis, or underdiagnosis of certain demographic groups.

The artificial intelligence (AI) system¹, trained on millions of audio clips of human sounds, might one day be used by physicians to diagnose diseases including COVID-19 and tuberculosis and to assess how well a person's lungs are functioning.

Image-intensive specialties like radiology, pathology, and dermatology may be taken over by AI computer vision and convoluted neural networks.

AI Does Not Replace Dermatologists

Human Touch and Empathy: Artificial intelligence lacks the human touch and empathy crucial in patient care. Dermatologists provide comfort, understanding, and personalized care that AI cannot replicate.