Radiology resident thumbs nose at Nobel Prize winner who predicted specialty would become obsolete
A University of California Davis radiology resident is criticizing the Nobel Prize winner who predicted AI would render the specialty obsolete by 2021.
Geoffrey Hinton, the 76-year-old “Godfather of AI,” famously forecasted in 2o16 that advances in AI would take over radiologists’ duties within five years. Eight years later, the prediction has proven false and now the specialty faces a “historic labor shortage,” Arjun Byju, MD, wrote for the New Republic Friday.
Now in his second year of residency at UCD, Byju was a junior in college when Hinton suggested that medical schools should immediately stop training radiology residents because “we’ve got plenty already.”
“Eight years have passed, and Hinton’s prophecy clearly did not come true; deep learning can’t do what a radiologist does, and we are now facing the largest radiologist shortage in history, with imaging at some centers backlogged for months,” he wrote. “That’s not to say Hinton was entirely wrong about the promise of AI in radiology, among other fields. But it’s become clear in my field that his hyperbolic predictions of 2016, just like those of today’s AI skeptics, are missing the much more nuanced reality of how AI will—and won’t—shape our jobs in the years to come.”
“AI is on everyone’s minds,” the radiology resident admitted, though routine practice use is not ubiquitous. Medical students cycling through the reading room often ask whether Byju and his colleagues will have a job in 10 years. Hospital leaders, computer science experts and surgeons tell him AI is either “here to save the day or to eat my lunch.” In Byju’s opinion, algorithms will perform some of the tasks radiologists currently handle, while radiologists will handle the balance, including some potential yet-to-imagined tasks.
“It’s challenging at this point to see through the fog of hype, although I don’t doubt that AI will play a significant role in my job in a few decades,” he wrote. “I’m reminded of futurologist Roy Amara’s aphorism: ‘We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.’”
Read the rest of the opinion piece in the New Republic politics section:
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.