A Chat With Hippocrates: The Oath in the Age of AI

In 2005, Weill Cornell Medicine revised the Hippocratic Oath. Since then, this revised oath has been administered to graduating medical students and become part of the curriculum during first-year orientation. In a flipped classroom exercise, one of the students questioned the Hippocratic injunction, "That I seek the counsel of others when they are more expert." The student wondered whether a physician should step aside in favor of artificial intelligence (AI). Should physicians defer to its expertise? In this Commentary, the author responds to this query, balancing the ethical mandate to use this emerging technology to provide the best evidence-based medicine to those entrusted to one's care against the risk of delegating responsibility to an entity that can neither worry about the provision of care nor provide the therapeutic balm of the patient-physician relationship. The author questions how AI might affect professional formation and medical education, alter the development of a caring ethos, and foster a misplaced confidence in the extent of our medical knowledge. Delegation of writing and thinking to AI could similarly undermine opportunities for learning and human discernment, which can be the font for discovery. The author notes the irony that AI, as an all-knowing and all-seeing muse, might replace Apollo to which the oath pledges fealty. The author asks if medicine wants to replace one mythology with another and cede the most humanistic of disciplines to a machine. If machines are allowed to think for us, physicians will lose an essential element of practice, forsaking the requisite self-knowledge to have agency and responsibility for their actions, thus ending medicine as it has been known.