“The tools aren’t there. And if they are there, that general intelligence is going to change the world beyond imaging — that changes everything,” he adds

And after years in what some call the “AI Winter,” Dr. Erickson says, the technology is advancing quickly, and health care professionals should embrace the future.


“I doubt there will be a role in health care that won’t be changed. I think it will have a dramatic impact on primary care,” he says. “I think the fact that we all have devices like smartphones listening to us all the time, looking at our face, listening to our voice, holding them up to our ear — this is how we measure body temperature, right? I think computers will have such extensive knowledge about our health that our personal devices will start to make diagnoses long before a primary care physician could.

“They’re going to have so much information about us that I think they’re going to be really the new front line in health care. Again, it’s not that they’re going to replace primary care doctors, but they’re really going to make the nature of what a primary care doctor does very different. Hopefully it means that they will get patients to be treated for things that need to be treated earlier, and will focus the primary care docs on the ones that need a little more attention because it’s an atypical presentation or some other disease that you can’t just phone in a prescription for.”

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