AI CEOs keep saying wildly incorrect things about radiology

Here’s a quote from the Anthropic CEO on how he thinks radiologists work today:

“There’s this story of, like—I think it was Geoff Hinton—predicting that AI will replace radiologists. And indeed, AI has gotten better than radiologists at, you know, doing scans, right?

But what happens today is there aren’t less radiologists. What the radiologist does is they walk the patient through the scan, and they kind of talk to the patient. So, the most highly technical part of the job has gone away, but somehow there’s still some demand for like the kind of underlying human skill.”

This follows another quote by Jensen Huang essentially saying the same thing, that image interpretation has gone away but radiologists are now just focusing more on the “human” aspect of medicine.

As someone who works in radiology, I can’t begin to tell you how wrong this is. While they’re right on one point, that demand for doctors hasn’t gone down, it’s not in spite of AI, but because it hasn’t demonstrably shown any significant increase in efficiency for radiologists. The majority of our day is spent doing the same interpretation we did 10 years ago, the only commercially available AI we use focuses on a small of diseases and gives us a yes/no answer for each. Nothing has changed in any impactful way, and radiologists aren’t “walking patients through the scan” (which is what technologists do anyway).

People outside of this field should know they’re either saying these things out of complete ignorance (completely possible) or they’re lying to you, maybe to assuage fears of AI takeover and to decrease worker’s reluctance to use AI. Either way this doesn’t bode well for the people in charge of this technology.