The prevalence of Artificial Intelligence tools in so many aspects of our world prompted this year’s topic of the Converging Roads Conference, “The Future of Human Flourishing in Medicine” on Feb. 21 at St. Patrick’s Seminary & University in Menlo Park.
To learn more, Catholic San Francisco interviewed one of the conference speakers, Dr. Ethan Schimmoeller, a Catholic palliative medicine physician at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. At the upcoming Converging Roads Conference, Dr. Schimmoeller will speak on two topics, “The Benefits and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence in Health Care,” and on a panel discussing “Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Medicine.”
CSF: How has artificial intelligence affected the practice of medicine in today’s world?
Dr. Schimmoeller: Artificial intelligence in healthcare is rapidly expanding its footprint as it is in every field today, though the stakes of healthcare are higher than some fields, meaning implementation of new technologies is slower to give more time for better evidence, more safeguards, etc. I think the largest area right now is chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT to ask medical questions. In the most recent estimates, 66% of doctors ask a generative AI application for assistance with a case per week, and 33% of Americans use it regularly for mental health. Doctors are also using AI for scribe services; this “ambient” AI can help prepare for the visit by reviewing and synthesizing medical records, “listen” to the clinical encounter, and write notes for the chart, send letters, and call patients. Soon these applications will probably be assisting with diagnosis and treatment suggestions live in the encounter. This is not to mention areas where narrow AI applications have become staples of practice, such as detecting evidence of stroke on brain scans or tools integrated into the electronic health record to screen for sepsis.
CSF: How do you see it changing medicine going forward?
Dr. Schimmoeller: We are at a moment in healthcare where AI applications are being tried at seemingly every corner of medicine to see what ‘sticks,’ so the rate of change is dizzying. I think we are going to see medicine get progressively digital, democratized, and algorithmic. We are far past the point of questioning whether AI should have a role in medicine, but how it should look. I think one of the key questions, present in every other field incorporating AI, is what sort of relationship humans should have with artificial intelligence. Should it be a co-pilot alongside me as the doctor? Should it be a servant of sorts that attends to tedious tasks? Should it gain its own kind of voice to direct what its role is? I contend that how we answer these questions is tied to fundamental beliefs about what it means to be human in the first place. That shapes how we understand, for example, the value of personal interaction or the extent that suffering and healing can be purely technical phenomena that a robot can manage.
CSF: What are the benefits and what are the dangers/disadvantages?
Dr. Schimmoeller: New research is published every day, with accompanying mainstream press, showing how adding AI to all sorts of medical contexts improves measurable parameters. This amplifies the narrative that AI promises to improve our lives in unquestionably good ways. Some of this is probably true; however, I personally think it best to approach such claims with some healthy skepticism. For example, there are many individual stories touting how much time doctors have saved from using an AI scribe that they get to spend with their patients (and at home with their own families); however, one recent study, for example, showed they only saved an average 22 minutes per day. Is that worth it? Or rather, is that worth the Pandora’s Box it opens? Inevitably those scribes, for instance, will include new features that push more and more into the core of the practice of medicine: face-to-face visits with patients. Such a growing presence will make doctors – and thus patients – more reliant on them. We can expect such anticipated features to make medicine more efficient, but will they make medicine more moral? Will they accent or undercut appreciation for the dignity of vulnerable patients? Is it worth trading some amount of the human side of medicine for digital gains? Again, this seems to be the question confronting every field.
CSF: How do you use AI in your practice?
Dr. Schimmoeller: I personally do not use AI in my work, though it is becoming so ubiquitous that it is difficult to avoid. Even a simple internet search now automatically generates an AI answer. To some extent, I embrace Luddite tendencies. The Luddites were a group of 19th century English textile artisans who rejected the use of automated machinery to make clothes. They did this not because they hated new tools or technology as such, but because they (rightly) believed quality would decrease and would be a means by which powerful capitalists could take over control of their craft and thus their way of life. They were protecting a vision of solidarity roughly in line with the economic philosophy of distributism advocated by GK Chesterton and others. It is a moral vision, not only a technical (or economic) vision. Medicine will learn in the coming years what the true benefits and dangers are of the AI revolution.
CSF: Anything else Catholics should know about AI in medicine?
Dr. Schimmoeller: A couple of final points. First, we believe there are a whole range of “intelligences” in the universe from God’s infinite mind, to angelic minds, to human minds, to animal minds, and so forth. On balance, we don’t need to feel threatened by another kind of intelligence – machine artificial intelligence – in existence. In fact, it is probably best thought of as dependent on human intelligence anyway. We also don’t need to fall into groundless technological speculation that would assume humanity is doomed to be displaced by AI as the dominant species. In fact, there is much that human intelligence can do that a machine can never do – to sum it up I would say contemplation.
A second point, we are more than minds or brains on a stick. We are embodied souls made in the image and likeness of God, something the incarnation of Christ reveals most profoundly. This is to say all of human life derives its uniqueness from being embodied in the real world; the virtual world of AI is a simulacrum of the real world, and we risk forfeiting this real world where Christ is present for the virtual world of our own fashioning. It’s an old story, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Many of the Church Fathers, especially the Greek fathers, emphasize that God had intended to give the fruit of the forbidden tree to Adam and Eve in the garden once they were wise and mature enough for the knowledge that fruit would give them. They were created as teenagers, so to speak, who needed to grow up morally and spiritually so they had the virtue to use such a powerful fruit in their hands rightly. This applies well to AI and we ought to be asking ourselves if we are morally ready for such powerful technology.
This interview was conducted via email by Valerie Schmalz, director of the Office of Human Life & Dignity, on behalf of Catholic San Francisco in advance of the conference.
To learn more about the upcoming conference or to sign up, go here.
