I’ve been fascinated with artificial intelligence for a long time. One of my original cartoons was a computer taking over a radiologist’s job, but I never finished it because I just could not figure out how to make it work. Then a radiology timeline idea came to me and I was finally able to incorporate AI into one of my comics after years of mulling it over.
I know it’s not drawn to scale and that I have left out some key milestones in radiology, but I think the message is clear: the machines will one day rise to rule over us.
Even in my short career, I have seen people lose their jobs due to the rise of the machines. I still remember during training having to walk down to the transcriptionist area to get a report fixed. In an isolated part of the hospital I found the transcriptionists at their desks listening to recorded dictations and typing them into reports.
If I were to go to that room now, I’m sure I would not find any transcriptionist. They were replaced long ago by voice recognition software. So should radiologists be worried that they will some day be replaced by robots? Read my post about how you can use AI in radiology right now!