First they came for the programmers… Then they came for the doctors. But not really.

Back in September 2023 I noted that the biggest hurdle for AI completely replacing physicians is the physicality of the job. Sure, LLMs are good at giving differential diagnoses and faking empathy once somebody’s problem has been reduced to text, but the art of medicine is in the act of seeing, feeling, smelling, etc. [Note: Although increasingly less so, as doctors and trainees are becoming experts at treating patients in the chart and not those in front of them, making themselves the perfect foils for replacement; queue photo of the old man yelling at clouds. ] If clankers have any hope of replacing humans, they’d better get some senses. At first glance, a recent Nature Medicine paper aimed to do just that by introducing what the group of authors — all of them Google employees based in the UK and California — call “multimodal reasoning” but is in fact the chatbot being able to interpret images, ECGs and lab reports in addition to the pre-digested clinical pearl. The topline result,…