6 days ago4 min read
When Doctors Start Competing With Algorithms
In recent years, medicine has begun to share its authority with a new kind of decision-maker: the algorithm. Artificial intelligence systems now read X-rays, flag tumours on scans, predict patient deterioration, and suggest diagnoses faster than any human clinician could. In some cases, they are already more accurate than doctors in narrow, well-defined tasks. This raises an uncomfortable question: if an algorithm can diagnose faster, cheaper, and sometimes better—what happen