A conundrum ...

Francesco Ciccolella

This is what happens if one get's too attached to AI as AI makes it easy, almost too easy to make you believe you are better at what you do instead of taking the time to master the discipline at hand, something now happening to doctors as we speak.

In the past few years, studies have described the many ways A.I. tools have made doctors better at their jobs: It’s aided them in spotting cancer, allowed them to make diagnoses faster and in some cases, helped them more accurately predict who’s at risk of complications.

But new research suggests that collaborating with A.I. may have a hidden cost.

A study published in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology found that after just three months of using an A.I. tool designed to help spot precancerous growths during colonoscopies, doctors were significantly worse at finding the growths on their own.

This is the first evidence that relying on A.I. tools might erode a doctor’s ability to perform fundamental skills without the technology, a phenomenon known as “deskilling.”

“This is a two-way process,” said Dr. Omer Ahmad, a gastroenterologist at University College Hospital London who published an editorial alongside the study. “We give A.I. inputs that affect its output, but it also seems to affect our behavior as well.”

There's always a cost. As stated many time before, There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.

TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order
by Pierre Dos Utt (1949)

AI, the Siren Call that forever beckons. 

Odysseus and the Sirens, eponymous vase of the Siren Painter, c. 475 BC