Talkin' Bout a Revolution

Medical artificial intelligence is not a revolution. It’s a signal of decadence.

PROGRESS HAS STALLED IN MANY FIELDS OF MEDICINE and is going to stall in many others during our lifetime.

However, we, the children of positivism and enlightenment, see the human experience as a perpetual move toward improvement. We see history as evolution, particularly in science. Science makes us Human and omnipotent. It's just a matter of time for us to solve everything and finally arrive at…?

Teleological optimism is not an idea for early 21st-century humans. It's our ideal. It's the constitutive myth of Man in our post-God Western culture. Like Babelians, we believe we will transcend the limits of our body and environment. It's just a matter of organizing our best efforts and we will eventually transcend the human condition. We will be no more contingent. We will defeat pain and disease. Some say we will reach immortality. Do you realize we are so omnipotent that we decided on Earth's temperature? All we had to do was a high-level authorities meeting.

But the Tower will eventually fall. The other side of omnipotence is guilt and hatred. Sounds familiar?

There is only one way to go. Let's talk with Popper and Kuhn. Let's look to our past to extrapolate the final consequences. In our pathway lays the failure of medical artificial intelligence.

Like Candide, we will conclude that we must cultivate our garden.