The Future of Medicine is a Doctor-Patient-AI triangle where machines augment clinical care and diagnostics

The future of medicine is a physician-patient-AI golden triangle, one in which machines augment clinical care and diagnostics—one with the patient at its heart.

That is the takeaway message of DeepMind researcher Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam, who presented his vision of AI-enabled healthcare Monday at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine conference in San Diego.

You’ve probably heard of DeepMind: it’s the company that brought us the jaw-dropping Go-playing AI agent AlphaGo. It’s also the company that pioneered a powerful deep learning approach called deep reinforcement learning, which can train AI to solve increasingly complex problems without explicitly telling them what to do.

“It’s clear that there’s been remarkable progress in the underlying research of AI,” said Karthikesalingam. “But I...