At the inaugural DOC gathering last year, famed Valley VC Vinod Khosla made a bold prediction: AI will soon make medical care “essential free,” while at the same time enabling human doctors to scale their knowledge and caregiving five to ten fold. Bill Gates has made similar claims – and gone even further, saying that AI will “replace many doctors” with 10 years.
As we all contemplate a future of “AI everywhere,” perhaps no question is more polarizing than this: Will AI make human work obsolete? And if so, what happens to all of us? It’s the defining question of Mustafa Suleyman’s 2023 book “The Coming Wave,” in which Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, argues that AI will have “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce. “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton strikes a darker tone, warning “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”
This year at DOC, we’re going to host a robust debate on this topic, centering our conversation on that most human of roles: The physician. The question up for debate: “When, if ever, will AI replace doctors?”
The dialog will mimic the formal, structured format of the Oxford debates, and feature four exceedingly well-qualified experts. Arguing that AI will replace doctors are Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer of Anthropic and co-founder of Instagram, as well as Anitha Kannan, Ph.D., VP of AI at Curai Health. Taking the opposing view – that AI will certainly change how doctors practice, but not replace them entirely – will be Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Inflection AI, Manas AI, LinkedIn, Microsoft Board Director, and general Valley legend, as well as Dr. Eric Verdin, a foremost expert on longevity medicine and CEO of the Buck Institute. Moderating with his trademark panache will be DOC curator and Private Medical founder Dr. Jordan Shlain.
Joining our debaters on stage will be a few special guests: Two AI agents designed by DOC partner Anthropic will fortify the arguments for each team’s position, and a third agent, designed for neutrality, will render a final opinion on which side has won the day. In the end, however, we’ll let the people in the room have the final vote, but regardless of the outcome, this is sure to be a great conversation. If you’re holding an invitation to DOC, you won’t want to miss it. And if you can’t make it, we’ll publish the video of the session shortly after it happens next month. We hope to see you in Napa next month!