Bob Wachter

How do you see the role of the physician changing?

And I would assume this means that medical education should be changing quite a bit too, yes?

I think for now, it would be a mistake to take too much of clinical reasoning and the facts of medicine off the plates of trainees.

That's Bob Wachter again.

Because I think you could easily enter a death spiral where the AI is better than the doctor because the doctors are getting worse.

You're talking about de-skilling now, yes?

I'm talking about de-skilling.

Is the de-skilling argument, which is that...

You know, if physicians continue to rely on technologies like AI, they will lose the ability or the skill to actually do what they used to do.

Is that an argument being made by the physician incumbency to scare off AI?

Partly, but not completely.

You know, there's good de-skilling and bad de-skilling.

I will admit to you, I have de-skilled on map reading.

can no longer read a map.

The question about de-skilling in medicine is complicated.

There are parts of de-skilling, for example, the physical exam we're definitely not as good at as we used to be.

There are elders who lament that partly because the physical exam was about its clinical value and partly about the laying on of hands and sort of the connection between the doctor and the patient.

But I think it gets romanticized.

I would rather have a CAT scan than my lung exam to try to figure out what's going on in your lungs or your abdomen.

So there are certain parts of de-skilling that just happen because the new technology is better than what we used to do, and you no longer need the technology.