23/09/2025
In July, the physician Dhruv Khullar travelled to Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine to witness a face-off between a new A.I. model, CaBot, and Daniel Restrepo, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an expert diagnostician. The same case was presented to both CaBot and Restrepo: a 41-year-old man was experiencing fevers, body aches, and swollen ankles. The man had a painful rash on his shins and had fainted twice. A few months earlier, doctors had placed a stent in his heart. A CT scan showed lung nodules and enlarged lymph nodes in the man’s chest. Restrepo had been given six weeks to prepare his presentation, he explained with a smile. “Dr. CaBot got six minutes,” he said. Both came to the same diagnosis: Löfgren syndrome. “For a moment the audience was silent,” Khullar writes. “Then a murmur rippled through the room. A frontier seemed to have been crossed.”
“For a long time, when I’ve tried to imagine A.I. performing the complex cognitive work of doctors, I’ve asked, How could it?” Khullar writes. “The demonstration forced me to confront the opposite question: How could it not?” Khullar writes about how A.I. tools are already shaping patient care—and why we should be wary of letting them diagnose us: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Zqt5QX
