Will AI Take My Job?

she said.

Dr. Rameau encouraged otolaryngologists to work alongside engineers who are developing these tools to make sure the tools are applicable to otolaryngologic care. Noting that few otolaryngologists are board certified in clinical informatics, she underscored the need for more members to earn a certification in this specialty area that provides an in-depth understanding of issues such as interoperability and machine learning.

For all otolaryngologists, she urged fearlessness in embracing change as they experience the excitement and exercise the caution needed when adopting a powerful tool such as AI.

Dr. Ramakrishnan also encouraged otolaryngologists to actively participate in developing, testing, and directing AI applications to ensure they offer needed solutions for the specialty. “I am concerned that the growing hype [around AI] is resulting in AI being a hammer that is looking for nails,” he said, “and that AI applications in healthcare will be most rapidly developed by large well-funded groups for the business of healthcare rather than the delivery of it.”

There are aspects of medical care that will always require a human physician.” —Maya G. Sardesai, MD

Regardless of the hype, excitement, and caution around AI in healthcare, and in otolaryngology specifically, what remains at the end of the day are those parts of being a physician that machines can’t easily replace. “There are aspects of medical care that will always require a human physician,” said Maya G. Sardesai, MD, MEd, associate professor and associate residency program director in otolaryngology–head and neck surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. Among these aspects are the need for human judgment to discern, for example, atypical presentations of a disease that don’t necessarily follow statistically common patterns, the need to empathetically incorporate individual patient values and cultural factors into the planning and decision making around medical care, and the personal back and forth of human conversation upon which the doctor-patient relationship is built, often over time. “This relationship itself can contribute to healing,” she said.

Epilogue

For now, at least, AI is less poised to replace physicians in tasks requiring qualities intrinsic to good medical care (observation, curiosity, judgment, empathy, warmth, and humor, to name a few) and more positioned for tasks involving rapid assessment of large amounts of data, finding patterns in that data, and generating potential answers or solutions to given questions. Whether or not AI will one day be able to effectively mimic more “human” qualities has yet to be seen, but rapid developments in foundational models being used to map the basic structural and functional units of life (cells) suggest that, one day, AI may be able to inform us of what we are as living organisms.

Stephen Quake, PhD, a biophysicist at Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., who helped develop universal cell embedding, a foundational model trained on a collection of cell atlas data from humans and other species, said, in a recent New York Times article, that the model “essentially rediscovered developmental biology” in its ability to, for example, teach itself how cells develop from a single fertilized egg (Zimmer C. A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive. The New York Times. March 12, 2024). “I think these models are going to help us get some fundamental understanding of the cell, which is going to provide some insight into what life really is,” he said in the article.

The question of whether AI will or can replace humans, particularly in endeavors that, at their essence, require the most human of qualities to achieve their aims—like physicians administering care to their patients—may one day be turned slightly on its head if AI is able to illuminate for humans what makes us human.   

Mary Beth Nierengarten is a freelance medical writer based in Minnesota.