The Last Residency

An imagined address to medical students on choosing a residency when AI handles routine cases. If trainees see only exceptions, how do they learn what an exception looks like? The essay argues that ordinary cases teach what ordinary looks like, and that simulation alone cannot replace supervised patient encounters, provisional assessments before seeing AI output, and learning what happened after a decision. It offers questions to ask on residency interviews, describes the different problem for midcareer physicians who already have a library of cases, and considers Ray Kurzweil's singularity forecast around 2045. It concludes by asking which training program will let a physician become useful when AI needs help — and whether anyone will let them look when AI is certain it does not.