Steve Lohr wrote an article for the New York Times titled Your A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be With You Soon (14 May 2025).
« The predicted extinction of radiologists provides a telling case study. So far, A.I. is proving to be a powerful medical tool to increase efficiency and magnify human abilities, rather than take anyone’s job. When it comes to developing and deploying A.I. in medicine, radiology has been a prime target. Of the more than 1,000 A.I. applications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in medicine, about three-fourths are in radiology. A.I. typically excels at identifying and measuring a specific abnormality, like a lung lesion or a breast lump. “There’s been amazing progress, but these A.I. tools for the most part look for one thing,” said Dr. Charles E. Kahn Jr., a professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and editor of the journal Radiology: Artificial Intelligence. »
« Radiologists do far more than study images. They advise other doctors and surgeons, talk to patients, write reports and analyze medical records. After identifying a suspect cluster of tissue in an organ, they interpret what it might mean for an individual patient with a particular medical history, tapping years of experience. Predictions that A.I. will steal jobs often “underestimate the complexity of the work that people actually do —just as radiologists do a lot more than reading scans,” said David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. »
« …specialists like Dr. Theodora Potretzke, who focuses on the kidneys, bladder and reproductive organs. She describes the radiologist’s role as “a doctor for other doctors,” clearly communicating the imaging results, assisting and advising. »
« Dr. Potretzke has collaborated on an A.I. tool that measures the volume of kidneys. Kidney growth, when combined with cysts, can predict decline in renal function before it shows up in blood tests. In the past, she measured kidney volume largely by hand, with the equivalent of a ruler on the screen and guesswork. Results varied, and the chore was a time-consuming… It can augment, assist and quantify, but I am not in a place where I give up interpretive conclusions to the technology.” »
« Dr. Francis Baffour, a staff radiologist… A.I. can also automatically identify images showing the highest probability of an abnormal growth, essentially telling the radiologist, “Look here first.” Another program scans images for blood clots in the heart or lungs, even when the medical focus may be elsewhere. “A.I. is everywhere in our workflow now,” Dr. Baffour said. »
« Dr. John Halamka.. an A.I. optimist, believes the technology will transform medicine. “Five years from now, it will be malpractice not to use A.I.,” he said. “But it will be humans and A.I. working together.” »
Comment on Twitter from Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan:
« … Radiology has embraced AI enthusiastically, and the labor force is growing nevertheless. The augmentation-not-automation effect of AI is despite the fact that AFAICT there is no identified “task” at which human radiologists beat AI. So maybe the “jobs are bundles of tasks” model in labor economics is incomplete. Paraphrasing something @MelMitchell1 pointed out to me, if you define jobs in terms of tasks maybe you’re actually defining away the most nuanced and hardest-to-automate aspects of jobs, which are at the boundaries between tasks.
Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about *other people’s jobs* that we don’t understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don’t appreciate all the nuances. If this is correct, it is irrelevant how good AI gets at task-based capability benchmarks… »
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