When Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, reflects on the extent to which healthcare jobs will be disrupted by artificial intelligence, he recalls an apocalyptic speech given by the British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton sent shockwaves through specialist medical education with his warning in 2016: “We should stop training radiologists now.
The number of positions offered grew by 43 per cent annually across the top 10 pharmaceutical companies alone since 2018. The consultancy highlighted AI’s capabilities, including knowledge extraction, content and compound generation, customer engagement, and coding and software generation. McKinsey attributes these strengths to “gen AI’s truly multimodal nature: foundational models are built not just on language but also on images, omics , patient information, and other types of data”.