In 2016, the “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, stood onstage at a machine learning conference in Toronto and declared AI would soon kill the radiology profession.
At the time, he said people should even stop training new radiologists because it was “completely obvious” that within five years (or 10 at most) AI would do a better job than humans at the same tasks.
“If you work as a radiologist, you’re like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down,” Hinton said.
For years, tech experts like Hinton predicted displacement by AI partly because some radiologists’ tasks are seemingly formulaic and repetitive, such as reading scans and writing reports.
And yet, despite the doomsday predictions, radiology may serve as an example that the warnings of AI-fueled job replacement may be oversold. Even Hinton stepped back from his drastic call last year, clarifying he was speaking purely about image analysis, the New York Times reported. In the future, he said human radiologists will work with AI to be even more efficient and effective.
