Episode #9
‘Will AI Save Lives?’ with Dr Charlotte Blease
What do you do when your chatbot understands you better than the people in your life? Dr Charlotte Blease is a health informaticist and philosopher who's spent the last decade surveying doctors about how they actually use AI, not how they're supposed to use it. She holds positions at Harvard Medical School, the University of Melbourne and Uppsala University, and she's the author of Doctor Bot. Her research keeps landing on the same uncomfortable point: medical error is far more common than we like to admit, and AI is already changing what "good care" looks like, whether the medical profession has caught up or not. In this conversation, Scott and Jean talk to Charlotte about: Why between 5 and 20% of primary care visits involve a diagnostic error, and why that number is probably too low Why more than half of UK GPs are now using tools like ChatGPT, most with zero training on how to do it safely The strange finding that doctors sometimes make AI less accurate when they try to work alongside it, because their own instincts get in the way Why written responses from ChatGPT have been rated as far more empathetic than responses from human doctors, and what that says about the "art of medicine" The rise of a shadow health system, where patients turn to chatbots for grief support, therapy and diagnosis before they ever see a doctor What Charlotte would tell a young person trying to build a career in a world where the machines are getting better at the things we thought were uniquely ours Further reading can be found in Charlotte's book, 'Doctor Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us - and How AI Could Save Lives'. If this episode made you think differently about your own job, send it to a colleague, and if you want more conversations like this, subscribe and leave us a review, it genuinely helps other people find the show.
