The Pendulum of Progress
Will artificial intelligence revolutionize medicine or amplify its deepest problems?
THE GIST: Ideologies exert a powerful influence in technology and medicine. Although often disguised in modern jargon, belief systems of rationalism and empiricism are ancient. Frequently unexamined, they polarize debates to this day. Yet individually, these ideologies fail to produce workable solutions. The complexities of the real world demand pluralism, the best of both worlds. Today, rebounding from rationalist dominance and fuelled by big data, AI and medicine tend strongly to empiricism.This alignment threatens to entrench the incumbents in cycles of codependency and reinforcing errors. Examples of these cycles include data as a cure-all, theory-free science, and the misuse of statistics. But there’s ample reason for optimism. A range of differences across medicine and AI may bring out the best that each community has to offer: urgency tempered with caution; an openness that values privacy; engineering pragmatism in scientific discovery. Hype and disillusionment are to be expected, a natural part of the process. But this isn’t another AI winter. These pendulum swings and ideological corrections are essential mechanisms of progress.
The American Medical Association (AMA) recently released its first policy recommendations for…
