| Dr. Zak Kohane is the first editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine’s new artificial intelligence publication. He also chairs the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and has rare dual expertise as a medical doctor and a doctor of computer science. He talked with Daniel about how to cut through the noise and determine which of the AI health hype is worth watching. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Is AI really going to revolutionize care? I think there’s an enormous amount of hype. And I think, by any metric, the number of companies that will make a meaningful contribution in five years is going to be a minority. And yet, I think that minority — an important, decisive minority — will be enormously impactful. Where will we see that impact? Primary and preventive care is now dissolving. That’s what we’re facing. It’s in that context that the question is not: “Is this going to change things?” It's really: “Well, things are changing anyway, but there are huge disparities.” How can we best leverage the workforce we have — not the one we want? We have very well-trained physician assistants and nurse practitioners. How can we use AI in concert with these individuals to provide primary and preventive care? What are you expecting in the coming months and years? The pace of change is accelerating, so a lot of the problems that we know about — whether it’s bias, hallucination, not being up to date, not having common sense — those problems will not look the same next year. It’s going to be, I think, unlike anything we’ve seen in the last 30, 40 years of medicine. Is the government ready for that? No. Frankly, most of us would not even know what to tell the government to do in this situation. So I think it’s appropriate that the government is saying that, as part of Biden’s executive order, we have to start putting together people who know stuff about this and start thinking about it.
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