Bob Wachter

speaker

553 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 24 Apr

Bob Wachter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 661. Can A.I. Save Your Life? · 30 Jan 2026 podcast

There's a lot of complexity in this that I think goes beyond...

the kind of decision-making support that Waze gave me this morning when I drove into the studio.

The tech companies are playing this as we have no interest in replacing the doctor.

We really want to be a co-pilot.

We want to be your wingman.

But they obviously do want to replace the doctor.

I think for the foreseeable future, the complexity of medicine, the stakes of medicine, the regulatory environment, and periodically I do have to say to a patient, you have Alzheimer's disease or you have cancer or

I don't think patients are going to accept the idea that a bot's going to tell them that.

Although you do write about the fact that AIs can do better in the empathy realm than humans.

That was one of the shockers that in those early years, which is really only two years ago, when we saw AI passing the medical licensing board or doing well on really tough clinical cases.

It was like, okay, it's pretty smart.

And then studies began to come out saying if you did a blinded trial of a patient actor being given answers either by doctors or by AI, they often preferred the answers from AI.

And the AI

appear to be more empathic.

Of course, the AI has no empathy, but it can fake it really, really well.

Some of my doctor friends have been telling me that their patients will come to them having used chat or some other AI bot to go through some scenarios or symptoms or whatever.

And the docs seem generally pretty happy about it.

And this is, to me, in stark contrast to a trend from 10 or 20 years ago where direct advertisement began on television for pharmaceuticals where patients would come and say, OK, I just heard about this thing.

I just need you to sign me up and give it to me.

And they feel now, at least this is for my friends, that the AIs are becoming a pretty decent research tool for the patient to then bring to them the expert.

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