Medscape 2050: Adam Rodman
There will come a day, predicts Adam Rodman, MD, a general internist and medical educator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, when AI systems change disease. That's the day when they can not only diagnose diseases more accurately than humans, but define diseases in ways that only machines can understand.
Take heart attacks, for example. Rodman hopes cardiologists will forgive him for pointing out that AI can already detect blocked coronary arteries from an EKG in ways that humans can't. In the not-too-distant future, Rodman believes, medicine will begin redefining more diseases and treatments that are simply not understandable by the human brain.
That day isn't here yet, Rodman explains, because today's AI systems are still pretty similar to us. 'They're trained on a human understanding of disease,' he says, 'so even the best models are following the guidelines that we give them.' They mimic human reasoning, albeit a lot faster and using a lot more data.
But as new AI models develop, we could reach what Rodman calls 'a nonhuman nosology': our clinical reasoning vs a machines-only thought process. And what happens when those disagree? What does it mean — for both doctors and patients — to trust a computer that we can't understand?
Is this the day when doctors are out of a job? Rodman doesn't think so. Because medicine is about more than computation. There are relationships and procedures that can't be replaced. But certain areas of clinical practice will certainly change. 'If you have a job where you can sit down at a computer and interpret most of the data that has already been collected for you to make a decision,' he says, you should start looking over your shoulder.
Medicine is going through an 'epistemic shift,' Rodman says, where the parameters of how we think are changing, so it's hard to predict what will come next. But we should all get ready.
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