AI Won't Replace Doctors, It'll Help Them | WIRED BizCon

People sort of often fret and wring their hands

about artificial intelligence coming to take our jobs,

people's jobs.

Is this kind of technology, does this displace

doctors and nurses?

Or how does it interact with the people who are using it?

Yeah, so I think one of the promises of this technology

is being able to make health care more accessible,

and so in the particular instance of the diabetes

eye screening, there's a lot of people, especially

in India, where everyone needs screening, and this

kind of blindness is completely preventable.

But because people can't get screened, about half

of the people actually suffer blindness, or sorry

vision loss before they're even detected.

So clearly there's something wrong in that we don't

screen enough people.

So I think what I hope will happen with something

like this is that we'll actually be able to find

more folks who have disease and actually be able

to intervene, and that's where the doctors really come in,

where we'll find more sick people as we do more screening.

And then the physicians will actually end up treating them

instead of spending a lot of time on just these rote tasks

which are detection oriented tasks.

So it becomes additive and not displacive.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, again, health care, there's just not enough

to go around, not enough expertise to go around,

and so we need to actually have our specialists

and our experts to be actually working on treating

our people who are sick.

And so this I think hopefully will balance that

and allow people to treat more folks.