Can you imagine (or remember) a world without cell phones and the internet? In a few years it may be tough to imagine a world without artificial intelligence (AI). AI is the re-creation of human intelligence in machines, complete with the ability to learn, reason and solve problems. AI can be quite intimidating—it has created its own language that humans can’t understand and has even beaten top Air Force pilots in a simulated dogfight.
These descriptions can conjure a Matrix-esque dystopian future. On the flip side, AI has the potential to create a medical utopia by greatly accelerating the development of new drugs, potentially eradicating existing diseases and alleviating human suffering.
Last year, a deep learning service called AlphaFold 3 was released. This AI-generated program can model—with striking precision—how a protein will fold and interact with its environment. Proteins make up the human body and fold to form three-dimensional structures. The complex ways a protein can fold dictate its function and ability to interact with its environment, with millions of possibilities. If a protein overheats, the folds unravel and the protein becomes useless. On paper, this does not sound like much. But in practice, using AI to predict protein folding could rapidly accelerate drug discovery and help find and treat genetic mutations that cause disease.
There are many ethical concerns about the use of AI in medicine or at the doctor’s office. For example, AI helps train medical students and the next generation of physicians. AI can enhance the ability to access information and support logical reasoning, but it can be risky if people begin to rely on it too much. There are few guidelines for the use of AI for medical training. However, an article published in Advances in Physiology Education presents a framework to help medical schools integrate AI responsibly.
Not everyone likes the idea that a robot could be diagnosing their disease instead of a doctor. However, recent studies have shown that AI was more accurate in diagnosing conditions when compared to a physician’s diagnosis and greatly assists radiologists in analyzing medical images. Overall, many physicians agree there is a role for AI in health care, but the exact role remains to be seen.
It seems the integration of AI in medicine and physiology is inevitable—the genie is out of the bottle so to speak. AI itself may say it best.
When I asked ChatGPT “Do you think AI will revolutionize medicine?,” the program responded “While AI won’t replace doctors, it will augment their capabilities, making health care more precise, accessible and efficient. The biggest challenges will be ethics, data privacy and regulatory approval, but if these are addressed, AI will reshape medicine as we know it.”
The future is now. It’s up to us to make sure AI assists in creating a utopia and not a dystopia.
Dain Jacob, PhD, earned his doctoral degree in nutrition and exercise physiology from the University of Missouri. He is interested in drug development, scientific consulting and writing, and human clinical trials. Jacob served as a meeting blogger for the 2023 American Physiology Summit.