AI Is Not Magic | Dr. Douglas Manuel

AI in healthcare is often talked about as something magical. Dr. Douglas Manuel, a family and public health physician, senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and organizer of Ottawa's recent symposium on AI in health research, pushes back on that. AI is a tool, he argues, an instrument like the thermometer or the blood pressure cuff. A revolution, yes, but medicine has been absorbing new instruments for two thousand years, and like all of them, this one has to be calibrated.The conversation covers why AI scribes have been adopted faster than anything Manuel has seen in 35 years of medicine, why the messy data underneath the algorithms is the real bottleneck, and what leaders should watch for when choosing between AI products. He also draws on his pandemic experience as one of Ottawa's most visible medical voices, and lands on the warning easiest to overlook in the rush to adopt: almost every new technology widens inequities before it narrows them, and the question is never just whether a tool works, but who it works for.