The Promise and Pitfalls of AI in Medicine: Bob Wachter
episode
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
44 min
3 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 9 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Bob Wachter and what is his background in medicine and digital health?
Welcome to the Jerry Powell podcast. This is Eric Quadera. This is
Alex
Smith. And Alex, who do we have with us today?
Today we are delighted to welcome a very distinguished guest, Bob Walkter, who's a hospitalist and professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF. He's the author of The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computing Age. He's also credited with being the academic father, so to speak, of the hospitalist movement and coined the term hospitalist in the New England. Journal in the nineteen nineties. Bob, welcome to the Jerry Pell podcast.
Thank you, gentlemen. What a great pleasure to be here. I've been a long time admirer.
Yeah, we should say Bob yeah, Bob was an early supporter. I remember talking, walking through San Francisco Airport with Bob, we just happened to be like on similar at there at similar times, and saying, Eric and I are thinking about starting a blog. And Bob said to us, you know, I've had more invitations to speak than I have from from my blog and from my social media stuff than from anything I ever wrote in the New England Journal or other journals. What was it called again? What was it called again? Walkers World. Walkers or
I had Walter's World ran it for about seven or eight years and then kinda transitioned to Twitter before that became a cesspool. But yeah, it always struck me as strange in academia that that the coin of the realm was writing a paper for a journal, which of course is incredibly important, but maybe ten people might read it. Whereas if you do what you're doing and a thousand or ten thousand or hundred thousand people see it, you know, we're here to make an impact. So whatever works, works and and this clearly works.
Well, we got a lot to talk about. We're gonna be talking about AI and medicine. And you know, this was stimulated by uh uh grand rounds Bob just did at UCSF, which we'll have a link to in our show notes around AI and medicine. But before we jump into that topic, uh we always ask for a song request. Bob, do you have a song request? Well I actually see that you're sitting in front of the piano.
I have a request but I'm sitting here at a piano and uh and you guys goaded me into playing and singing. People should have a trigger warning that this will not be good. What are
you gonna play, Bob?
I'll give it a try and I'm gonna play a song that's relevant for AI because we're really talking about the future. So this is this is tomorrow from Annie. All right, here we go. And really forgive the voice. I was in my high school choir, but that was uh more than five years ago.
The sun come out. Tomorrow. At your bottom dollar that tomorrow. They'll be sorry. Just thinking about tomorrow, clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow. Oh there's no. Based. With a day that's great. Um I just stick at my Chin and grin and say the sun come out. Tomorrow, so you gotta hang on till tomorrow. I'm with me. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow, you're always a day away. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow, you're always
That was excellent bomb. There you go. I'm gonna keep my day job. I love it. That was great, Bob. I want to ask about that
song. It is an uplifting song. The sun's gonna come out. And I you know, that starts off with my first question for you, Bob. This is my big question. All right. I may be done after this one. Where are you with AI right now? Is this like, you know, Terminator Skynet or Agent Smith from The Matrix where the machines develop sentience and they take over and destroy us? Or is this more like short circuit or WALLI where you have these benevolent overlords or not overlords, benevolent helpers that are both cute, interesting? And maybe clean up some of our messes like Wally does.
It depends on uh Short term versus long term. Long term, I have no idea, but I worry a lot about it. I mean, I think over time, the capacity of bad actors to take this over, the possibility that many of us will not have jobs and that will create social unrest. Those are very real. I worry about this as the purveyor of misinformation.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Bob Wachter and what is his background in medicine and digital health?
0:00–5:04
2
What was the opening musical performance and how does it relate to the AI‑future analogy?
5:04–10:55
3
Is the future of AI in medicine more like Skynet or Wall‑E, according to the hosts and guest?
10:55–17:08
4
Why do some studies show AI being rated more empathetic than human clinicians?
17:08–22:40
5
What are the guest’s main concerns about the predictive‑model hype in healthcare?
22:40–28:53
6
How are digital scribes and AI‑generated notes expected to change clinical workflow?
28:53–34:18
7
What bias and transparency issues arise from AI being controlled by a few large companies?
34:18–39:24
8
What is the overall outlook on AI’s promise versus its pitfalls in medicine?
39:24–44:29
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
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