AI Has Human Doctors Asking: What’s Left for Us?

What happened

Don’t be fooled by the question mark in the title of an article published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. ” they were being rhetorical. Their answer is an emphatic YES. Many in the medical world are begrudgingly coming to terms with the premise that patients can get the best treatment by a hybrid approach where doctors work in consultation with well-trained bots.

” First he needed to validate the premise. He asked Khosla to collaborate, and the VC suggested that his son Neal Khosla join the effort, along with Emanuel’s researcher. Neal runs Curai Health, an online company that uses AI to treat patients, with a staff of doctors to prescribe medicine and handle more complicated issues.

One of the loudest dissenting voices is John Whyte, CEO of the American Medical Association, which represents all those doctors who will be worrying about what’s left. When I talked to him, Whyte began by noting what he saw as the paper’s shortcomings, including that some of the studies it surveyed are simulations, not blind experiments, and they don’t all support the article’s conclusion.

Notably, a February 2026 Nature article found that in real-life cases, most patients were unable to effectively converse with large language models to access their expertise. Whyte unsurprisingly bristled at the idea of removing humans from the clinical loop. “The AMA does see the potential in these tools, but they have to be utilized in the context of a care plan that’s governed by a physician,” he says.

Emanuel countered that he and his coauthors were careful in their conclusions. “It’s been less than four years since ChatGPT was introduced,” he said to me. “We’re making a prediction for four years from now. ” Seeking a second opinion, I consulted Wachter. ) Surprisingly, Wachter concedes that the authors of the paper have a point. “The argument they’re making is important,” he says.

AI is good, he says, and right now AI and humans together are better. “But that can no longer be chiseled into a tablet. ” Wachter is insistent, however, that the unique human attributes of trained physicians are vital and irreplaceable.

Why it matters

But this article’s thesis is that AI alone can deliver the best outcomes. “Review of all published articles on AI in medicine since January 1, 2024, shows that medicine is rapidly approaching the transition point at which AI alone will exceed physicians and physician AI-hybrids in providing the best care at five fundamental medical tasks,” they write.

Those tasks include taking medical histories, establishing a diagnosis, identifying what tests are needed, prescribing treatment, and managing chronic diseases. You know, doctoring. ” Stand back, doc, and let AI do its thing. Which used to be your thing.

Lead author Emanuel—brother of Ari and Rahm, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Penn and a renowned oncologist—told me that for many years, he’d dismissed the idea that AI could perform core medical functions. He would run into Khosla at conferences in the 2010s, and the VC would bend his ear about how AI would be doing 85 percent of what doctors did by 2035.

”(again, rhetorical) and penning a 101-page treatise in 2016 to that effect. “I said bullshit, there’s no way,” says Emanuel.

” But about a year ago, Emanuel’s friend Robert Wachter sent him galleys of his book A Giant Leap, where Wachter, who is head of medicine at UCSF, outlined a world where first-class medicine would be a collaborative process between AI and doctors, but the masses in “economy class” would mostly make do with AI alone. Emanuel began to think that Khosla might be right.

What to watch

AI may never be as effective in breaking the news of a grim prognosis than a human, and a patient may well be more likely to be guided to the best path of treatment by a real-life clinician.

Wachter invokes what he calls the doorman fallacy, named after the fear that people who opened doors for tenants in apartment buildings would be out of work once doors could open automatically. In fact doormen perform myriad tasks and are still an invaluable presence in white-glove buildings.