Speaker: John D. Lantos MD; Respondent: Angeliki Kerasidou (Ethox Centre, University of Oxford)
AI and genomics are transforming our understanding of health and disease. We can now trace a disease from its molecular roots to its pathophysiologic manifestations. In the past, we categorized diseases by their clinical and biochemical manifestations. We developed treatments based on the average responses of large populations of patients. We knew there were inexplicable variations in the natural history of most diseases and in the responses to identical therapies. We couldn’t explain those changes. Now we are beginning to understand them.
What will be left for doctors to do in this brave new world? We will need to develop humanistic skills in new ways. Medical training will need more sophisticated and sustained focus on the self-awareness that is essential for empathy, on the complexity of human psychology and spirituality, and the linguistic and meta-linguistic skills that enable communication. Our success or failure will determine whether AI is more like Skynet from Terminator, an artificial neural network-based superintelligence system that becomes conscious and attacks humans or like Wall-E, in which a benevolent, empathic AI, in a post-apocalyptic world, restores our humanity.
Programme & Registration
5.15pm
Introduction
Dominic Wilkinson, Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford
5.20pm
AI, Genomics, and the 21st Century Physician
John Lantos MD
6.00pm
Response
Angeliki Kerasidou
6.10 - 6.30pm
Discussion
Free to attend and all welcome, registration required.
John D. Lantos is an American pediatrician and a leading expert in medical ethics. He was Professor of Pediatrics at both the University of Chicago, where he was Associate Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine where he was also Director of the Children's Mercy Hospital Bioethics Center. He is the author of Do We Still Need Doctors (Routledge, 1999) and The Ethics of Shared Decision Making (Oxford, 2021) and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers.
Angeliki Kerasidou is an Associate Professor at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford. Angeliki’s research focuses on ethical issues that arise from the introduction of new technologies to, and the effect of socio-economic changes, on biomedical research and clinical practice.
