As AI becomes more pervasive in healthcare, can robots learn to show more empathy than doctors?
Except medicine requires more than just technical expertise: It needs empathy, too.
Empathy has been noticeably lacking in medicine as of late. In the past few decades, doctors have developed a reputation for being coldand aloof, for treating patients as numbers and objects, not human beings with valid lived experiences and unique histories. One of the most common complaints among patients today is the “clinical” attitude of their attending physicians. That word has become synonymous with detached, unempathetic, and impersonal treatment—everything many of us would much rather our attending physician not be.