Charlotte Blease begins this provocative long read with an intriguing analogy: “If planes fell from the sky with the regularity of deaths due to medical error, there would be outrage, inquiries and sweeping reform. When doctors make mistakes, however, the narrative is gentler: they are only human.”
Ms Blease’s background puts her in good place to ask the rhetorical question which is the title of this article. Ms Blease “is a philosopher and associate professor of health informatics at Uppsala University, Sweden, and research affiliate at the Division of Digital Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, US. Her work explores the ethics of artificial intelligence in healthcare, patient-clinician communication and the psychology of health encounters. She is the author of Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us – and How AI Could Save Lives (2025).”
Ms Blease says that there are four sets of arguments which points towards giving AI a far bigger role than it has today in medicine and specifically in diagnosis.
Firstly, she points to data which says that medical professionals are maxed out and exhausted: “Behind the white coats, many physicians are exhausted, depressed and burning out. Around half of doctors in the United States report burnout. In the United Kingdom, 40 per cent say they struggle to provide adequate care at least once a week, and a third feel unable to cope with their workload.”
Secondly, Ms Blease highlights that a mixture of ageing populations in the Western world, more chronic illnesses and limited medical budgets mean that doctors are being stretched to the limits of their competence: “Populations are growing, ageing, and living longer with chronic illnesses like cancer, diabetes and dementia. By 2030, the world will face an estimated shortage of around 10 million health workers. In parts of Europe, millions already lack a general practitioner (primary care physician). Shortages and stress form the perfect conditions for error. Burnout and fatigue are linked to mistakes in diagnosis, treatment and prescribing.”
Thirdly, she points to the data on how just common misdiagnosis is: “…medical error is among the leading causes of death worldwide. In the US, it is estimated that around 800,000 people die or become permanently disabled each year from diagnostic error alone… One study of intensive-care patients found that doctors who were ‘completely certain’ of their diagnosis were wrong as much as 40 per cent of the time.”
Fourthly, Ms Blease highlights the range of behavioural biases that doctors (like professionals in other fields) are vulnerable to: “We forget, misjudge, and grow overconfident; our moods, biases and blind spots shape what we see and what we judge to be the case. Burnout makes these weaknesses worse, but it does not create them. They are baked into the very psychology that once served us well in small ancestral groups, yet falters in the high-stakes, information-saturated, multitasking environment that is modern medicine. In other words, even at their best, doctors are human – and that means errors are inevitable.”
At this point in the essay, most experts would suggest that doctors should make greater use of AI to reduce the probability of making incorrect judgements. Ms Blease does NOT do that. She suggests something more radical, something that a country like India (which is which is desperately short of doctors) would do well to look at:
“Doctors are enmeshed in the very system under scrutiny. Their status, salaries and sense of self are bound up in the debate. Of course they want to believe they’re irreplaceable. But history shows that those most invested in their own survival are rarely the best judges of their own irreplaceability…
Surgeons once opposed anaesthesia because they feared it would erode their hard-won skill in operating quickly…
What matters is not sentiment but whether care can be made more accurate, more timely and more humane.
These questions, then, are not about abstract principles or clever thought experiments only. They cut through the texture of real lives – my family’s included – and they expose the fault lines of medicine itself. Doctors are fallible not simply because they are tired, or overworked, or badly resourced, but because they are human: bound by psychology, shaped by habits, and protected by institutions that defend their own interests. Technology will not save us if it simply reproduces medicine’s old flaws in digital form. …AI carries serious ethical and political risks – from deepening inequalities to new forms of harm, from lost jobs to environmental costs. These concerns deserve scrutiny. But what will not help is straw-manning the technology, or deferring endlessly to the very profession whose survival is at stake. Doctors cannot be the only ones asked to judge their own replaceability.
And so, to the present question: the very possibility of a Dr Bot. What matters is not sentiment but whether care can be made more accurate, more timely and more humane….It is natural that doctors defend their intuition, hard-won through gruelling training. But that defence is made from rarefied air, far above the lived reality of the patients medicine fails….
If Dr Bot is to have a role, it will not be as an imitation priest in a white coat, but as part of a wider reckoning with what medicine is for and who it should serve. The point is not to preserve a profession but to reimagine a practice.”
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