This transcript has been edited for clarity. This is Eric Topol with Medicine and the Machine, with my co-host, Abraham Verghese. This is a special edition for us, to speak with one of the leading lights of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world, Jeff Dean, who heads up Google AI. Jeff Dean, PhD: Thank you for having me. Topol: You have now been at Google for 22 years. In a recent book by Cade Metz (a New York Times tech journalist) called Genius Makers, you are one of the protagonists. I didn't know this about you, but you grew up across the globe. Your parents took you from Hawaii, where you were born, to Somalia, where you helped run a refugee camp during your middle school years. As a high school senior in Georgia where your father worked at the CDC, you built a software tool for them that helped researchers collect disease data, and nearly four decades later it remains a staple of epidemiology across the developing world.

Labor unions have been around since the mid-19th century, and they've helped many a teacher, government employee, electrical worker, and others gain fairer pay or better working conditions. Unions give workers a chance to dictate their own terms and present a united front, ideally leaving everyone better off (though parents whose kids can't go to school for days at a time due to teacher's strikes might disagree). But one profession that unionization has eluded is medicine. Dr. Eric Topol is the co-host of popular podcast Medicine and the Machine, editor in chief of medical news and education website Medscape, and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. In his opinion, the lack of a functioning union for doctors has detracted both from the satisfaction physicians get from their jobs, and the quality of care their patients receive.

This transcript has been edited for clarity. I'm Eric Topol, editor-in-chief of Medscape, and I'm excited to be joined by Abraham Verghese from Stanford University for our first "Medicine and the Machine" podcast. We're envisioning a monthly podcast where we discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) with the practice of medicine. This is obviously an important topic. It's timely, and we're thrilled to have the chance to have these conversations. Along the way, we will be bringing in other people and perspectives. Abraham Verghese, MD: Thank you so much, Eric. It's great to be a part of this.

When Kim Hilliard shows up at the clinic at the New Orleans University Medical Center, she's not there simply for an eye exam. The human touches she gets along the way help her navigate her complicated medical conditions. In addition to diabetes, the 56-year-old has high blood pressure. She has also had back surgery and has undergone bariatric surgery to help her control her weight. Hilliard is also at risk of blindness, which can result from a condition called diabetic retinopathy.

In a May 16 editorial published by The New York Times Magazine, Abraham Verghese, MD, a professor of internal medicine at Stanford University, explained that the popularity of electronic health records (EHRs) and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine may be overriding physicians' clinical judgement more than informing it. Unfortunately, he argues, physicians are becoming more vulnerable to self-doubt in the face of technologic advancement--and physicians are to blame. "In America today, the patient in the hospital bed is just the icon, a place holder for the real patient who is not in the bed but in the computer; that virtual entity gets all our attention" Verghese wrote. "The living, breathing source of the data and images we juggle, meanwhile, is in the bed and left wondering: Where is everyone? It's my body, you know!"