Dear Doctors, there is nothing to gain in making it AI vs doctors

With AI looming on the horizon, one specific group of humans, i.e., doctors do have an interesting or rather existential problem at hand, as they are highly intelligent humans who have invested huge amounts of time and trained really hard to be who they are.

I don’t see too many other human beings in the same situation as doctors, so I want to point out a few things that doctors may not have realised, because the AI vs. doctors fight is turning unnecessarily ugly and losers will be we, the non-doctors.

The core argument from doctors was and is based on the pattern-recognition skills that they have acquired through decades of education, training, practicing and then also reading/researching in some cases. So, when Google arrived on the scene and patients started walking in clinics with self-diagnosis and even self-medication, the initial response from the doctors was of anger, as expected. But, almost a decade thereafter, I see no change.

Meeting stupid people and more so when they have done stupid and self-harming things can anger one, but I doubt that it is the only reason for doctors’ anger.

The anger seems to stem from self-identity of “I-know-more” and hence “I-see-patterns-that-you-can’t” that Google has hurt by arming the most uneducated by tools that allow pattern-recognition.

If we ignore the anger part, from what I see, doctors have two options, i.e., to keep claiming that they are superior to AI or to understand what AI is doing and decide how they want to fight/integrate with AI.

As I see the first option to be in vogue, especially amongst the senior doctors, I am wishing them all the very best, but I would like the young doctors, many of whom are already using a lot of AI to start looking at what is happening around us in AI space.

I will like to start with the first lesson that I learnt from my son.

Like all dads=old people, I once told him that I have driven for more than a million kilometres (Yes. I have), and hence that experience makes me a superior driver, so he quickly pointed out that Tesla self-driving entity gets more than a million kilometres driving “experience” almost daily (through half a million teslas on the road) and it will keep doing/learning it till it exists.

That is what sums up the AI that doctors want to fight.

One of the reasons why some doctors think that AI is stupid or can’t match up is actually because of Google/Grok/ChatGPT/Perplexity et al.

So, let’s start with what they are and how they are not the AI that is reverberating underneath us.

Most of the public domain tools that we use have a completely different priority, and that is to engage and interact with humans and hence they have one core quality, i.e., speedy response at the cost of deeper exploration.

But, that isn’t what AI is all about.

The “real” AI is the deep research kind of AI that is allowed to take time, check and verify and also learn from the responses.

It is not that Grok or ChatGPT are also not designed to play a role here. Trump has built Grok with sole intention of catching up with huge data reserves that older players have and it is now diabolically successful in extracting information out humanity by responding quickly and quirkily too, making it a potential super-engine over a short time.

If you are a doctor banking on your ten years of learning and may be twenty years of practicing that must have taught you to see deeper patterns, please realise that your pattern-identification edge is purely because you have “seen” more (like my 1 million kilometres driving). And this, probably doesn’t cut too much ice when you are competing with large reasoning models crawling around us now.

If you are a doctor and young too, understand that there is no real point fighting. If you have looked at 100000 pathology reports or 10000 MRIs or 50000 X-rays over five years and have developed a direct or intuitive understanding of what they mean, please realise that an AI agent can do the same in a matter of a day.

You can still argue that above mentioned input data is not “all” that you diagnose with, but deep within we all know that it is an imaginary straw against an entity that can “learn” from a million sources that we can’t hope to access in our short lifetime with the small brain that we have.

AI is not only “smarter” with brute force computing power supporting it, its real edge is that it is “living” at the pace of a billion lifetimes. There is no way that I-have-more-white-hair logic that we old people use to silence young people works when we deal with AI.

The best option I see is of collaborating with AI. Use it instead of try to find a way to feel superior to it.

Please realise that you have one clear edge that no AI will ever have (that is my hope).

No court will ever be able to jail or punish AI for a mistake, so you will always be needed, to be held responsible.