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Keri Losavio | Issue: December 2023 | November 11, 2023

Award Presentations & Artificial Intelligence Top the List in Opening Session & Keynote Lecture

SAN DIEGO—Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to play a transformative role in healthcare. During the Opening Session & Awards on Saturday afternoon, keynote speaker Avi Goldfarb, PhD, delved into the dynamics of machine-driven prediction in medicine.

Dr. Avi Goldfarb, University of Toronto, delivered the keynote address at ACR Convergence 2023, San Diego.

Dr. Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He is also the chief data scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab. His research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy. Along with Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans, he is the author of the books Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence and Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence.

From neural nets and image net competitions to ChatGPT, Dr. Goldfarb traced the history of AI to today. He brought an economist’s eye to the topic. “If the machine is intelligent, what does that mean for me?” he asked. “Maybe we’ll have to welcome our AI overlords.”

“In the near term, AI … has almost has nothing to do with machines that can think the way humans can think. … Don’t think about it as a machine that can do everything a human can do. … Instead think of it as a prediction machine, using information you have to generate information you don’t have. …

“Medical diagnosis is a problem of prediction.” But judgment is a human thing. “Machines don’t make decisions. … People decide. Machines predict.”

The takeaway? AI has the potential to transform medicine. “Yes, AI can likely diagnose patients better than 90% of physicians,” said Dr. Goldfarb, “so what does that leave for rheumatologists to do? Everything else.

“You want to be doing the other aspects of decision making that aren’t about prediction. The judgment about what matters remains with you.”

Dr. Goldfarb encouraged attendees to consider their mission. Is your mission diagnosis or patient care? “How much of what you do is really about what it means to do better?”