Autonomous AI and the future of clinical care: an expert interview with Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD

​"You're not going to get replaced by AI, but you might get replaced by someone using AI" has been a source of comfort to people across industries in these strange times.

​But what if that isn't the case? A recent JAMA Perspective article from Ezekiel Emanuel, along with co-authors Abe Baker-Butler, Neal Khosla of Curai Health, and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, contends that AI alone already rivals or outperforms physicians at five fundamental cognitive tasks: eliciting patient information, differential diagnosis, diagnostic test selection, guideline-concordant treatment, and chronic disease management. Furthermore, they contend the gap is only widening.

​Most provocatively, they note that AI alone outperforms humans alone at a task and that putting a human in the loop tends to degrade performance rather than improve it because physicians introduce errors and are poorly calibrated about when to defer to the machine.

​Dr. Emanuel is Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and a professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. HTN's Kevin O'Leary will sit down with him to work through the argument and what it means for the future of healthcare delivery.

​Live event open to everyone, replay and transcript exclusively available for HTN Pros.