Will doctors be replaced by algorithms? - Scope

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, algorithms will be capable of performing clinical tasks -- like diagnosing disease -- much faster and with greater accuracy than any human physician. At that point, the argument goes, we physicians will be out of work. I've now encountered this opinion throughout Silicon Valley and have had a number of students approach me with concern. Should medical professionals be worried? I can trace some of the anxiety back to last year, when researchers at Stanford Medicine announced they had developed an algorithm that, in just a matter of weeks, was trained to interpret chest x-ray images to diagnose more than a dozen medical conditions.