October - 20198In My OpinionProfessor Erwin Loh, Group Chief Medical Officer, St Vincent's Health AustraliaByIn the middle ages, doctors were physicians who practised medicine from ivory towers as intellectuals who refused to get their hands dirty, so they left the surgery to barbers, who were the practitioners who went into the battlefield to sew up wounds, amputate limbs and did the dirty, bloody operations that the doctors at the time felt were beneath their station.How times have changed ­ today, surgeons are highly specialised doctors who would now argue that they are the doctors who can do surgical procedures that their physician colleagues are not credentialed or trained to carry out. The role of the doctor has changed, and will continue to change.As a medical leader, I have a deep interest in understanding, foreseeing, and planning for such changes, so that the profession itself is not reacting, but proactively anticipating and leading the change itself. One of these potential disruptive drivers of change in medicine comes from the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in health.Late last year, researchers surveyed over a thousand GPs in the UK, and found that the majority of them said that AI would never replace doctors. However, more and more commentators, computer scientists, futurists and medical researchers are publishing papers predicting a seismic change in the clinical landscape, where WILL THE RISE OF AI MAKE US HUMAN DOCTORS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES, OR BE THE NEXT PHASE OF OUR EVOLUTION?Erwin Loh
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