Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools have the potential to transform clinical medicine, an editorialist writes, and they also are changing medical education. “Students should be trained to operate at a higher cognitive level earlier than they do now,” the author writes. “Their education needs to move more quickly beyond simple data gathering, synthesis, and analysis. Just as it became less important to have students focus on the memorization of large bodies of knowledge decades ago, it may no longer be as relevant to have them be well practiced in summarizing, reorganizing, and restating information from multiple sources.…”
The author concludes: “This should be a time of tremendous anticipation in medical schools. Physician tasks that have been the focus for a long time (such as data gathering, information search, and even probabilistic decision analysis) will evolve into their newer, more efficient, and hopefully less error-prone AI-aided forms. The medical profession should unerringly zero in on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will most distinguish top physicians in the future, who will use and be supported by a new generation of technological tools. Medical students need to be trained to become physicians who are more intellectually incisive in complex clinical reasoning, more effectively compassionate in their communication, and more attuned to the physical observation and manipulation of the body—in other words, more human.”