He Predicted AI Would Wipe Out Radiologists | Nobel Prize Winner - Geoffrey Hinton

So I predicted in 2016 that in about 5 years radiologists wouldn't be reading scans anymore.

Okay, there's a whole bunch of reasons why that was a bad prediction. The first is that health care is elastic. So if you could do more scans and get more scans read, there'd be a lot more scans happening. And that's one thing that's happening. So we a fraction of the cost of a significant fraction of the cost of doing a scan is the cost of the radiologist interpreting it. As AI gets to help more and more radiologists interpret scans, we can interpret them faster and faster for less and less money. They're getting more efficient. And you would have thought that would mean you needed less radiologists, but actually what it means is you get more scans. So that aspect of the prediction was wrong. A second thing that was wrong was I didn't know enough about radiologists and what they do. And that was because I had a former student who had an MD and then did a physics PhD with me on something called Boltzmann machines. And he didn't particularly like people. So he got a job as a radiologist just interpreting scans. And he was my model for radiologist. All he did was interpret scans. He never talked to people. And that's what was going to get replaced. And that is now becoming replaced. So I think there's now of the order of a hundred AI systems for interpreting scans that have been federally approved. And they're being used a lot by radiologists.

And I think as time goes by, they're going to get better. The radiologists aren't going to get better. They're going to get better because they can see a lot more data than the radiologists. So it's happening. It's just happening in a much slower time scale than I predicted.

Yes.

There will be a lot more scans. There will be more and more scans, and nearly all of them will be done by AI.

Yes, but I was way early because I didn't understand enough. The radiologist will still be doing other things. They'll still be discussing treatments with people for example.

I don't know for sure, but when I was still... I didn't think that was a public statement I made. It was just a lecture at a hospital.

And here we are talking about it today. People picked up on it, and I still think in terms of reading scans, that'll be done more and more by AI. And in the end, AI will be doing nearly all the scans. Maybe in a few very tricky cases, radiologists will be consulted. But radiologists of course do other things, and I think they'll continue to do other things.

Okay, so you have to look at whether some kind of employment has an elastic market or a non-elastic market. So for example, if you take people in call centers, when you call up to complain about your bill or to see if you can get a cheaper account, stuff like that, that's not so elastic. AI will replace all of them. It'll know much better on what the correct answers are. Often they don't know the right answer. They're poorly trained and badly paid. And AI can just do a better job. They're out of work.

Right.