By Vijaya Krishnan

As an academician, I’ve always wondered what drove the students. It’s interesting to discover their source for the passion and inspiration to pursue medicine. How can I empower and nurture them to continue their journey with the same awe for the miracle that is the human body that I grew up with?

Covid and the following digital transformation has left us grasping at straws. The Gen Z and Gen Alpha have become exceptionally adept at handling the smart technology. Change from classrooms to screens, books to PDFs, real time patients to virtual scenarios has been phenomenal. Everything has suddenly become bright and animated. The boring case based learning and self-directed approach has become outdated. Artificial Intelligence has become the new fascination.

With the diminishing attention span of these digitized generations, it’s challenging to transform myself from being just a guru to a cool facilitator who the students relate to. It’s a constant struggle to monitor the content available online, so that students get the right information. Inquiry based learning approaches are rampant nowadays. This is both amusing and frightening for me as a teacher. The need to connect to my student audience becomes more and more intense in such situations. With this in mind, I decided to give myself an upgrade and dive into exploring the world of expert systems and AI technology.

Oh boy! Didn’t realize the depth of these waters when I jumped in. It’s vast and felt ever evolving and endless. Systems created by us, that learned from us with our inputs, and also replicated our biases. The good, the bad, and everything in between. As a medical professional, expert systems felt like an extension of humanity with Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, artificial neural networks, etc. enhancing and replicating various human systems. It hit me then, how the developers of these systems might get the GOD Complex of creating complex codes which empower technology from Applications to Chat bots to humanoids. This is a revelation indeed. Awesome. These expert systems left very few things to imagination. It was amazing to put on the VR glasses and see the entire human circulatory system. That feeling when I could see the human heart or brain right in the palm of my hand. This made studying so much easier and fun, made me reflect on what I missed during my undergraduate education. The various applications which made both diagnosis and treatment simplified and interactive. It was interesting to note how AI caught on to various findings and observations. Also, how cool is it that AI tools make decisions. Some of them whose origins are untraceable – they call it the black box effect.

All this literature intrigued me and drove me to try and explore one such app in my teaching institute. Now I realized that AI was always there. From its inception in the year 1956, till the AI Winter twice, it co-existed in cyberspace with us. The digitization following the pandemic gave it a much-needed boost to grow further. To see the students’ response to the AI tool, I choose cervical posture assessment as my topic, posture assessment being one of the basic assessment skills required in Physiotherapy Practice.

The more I delved deeper, the more I realized the flip side of using Artificial Intelligence in medical teaching. The main challenge is to choose the correct tool. There are so many applications available it’s almost impossible to find the right one. I had to first identify which is an actual AI tool. When you get there, you realize that many of them are not tested for reliability and validity. Then there’s also the whole pandora’s bag of ethical concerns raised and addressed as per different situations. While working with the tool, students found it engaging. Somewhere down the line this left me wondering: Am I threatened by the existence of AI? Right then when I had lost all hope and accepted the fact that I can’t compete with AI, I felt the students look up to me to teach them how to use AI. What a relief! They do need me after all. I realized that AI when used appropriately enhances my role as a facilitator.

Though most of us are terrified of the digital world, we still have a long way to go to understand the Cyber Era. Whether we like it or not, Humanoids are here and they are here to stay. We need to prepare ourselves and our future generations to understand and embrace Artificial Intelligence. Somewhere deep down the fear still lingers; it’s not if but when will the machines replace us altogether? Will there be a Terminator scenario like the fictional movies? Augmented Cognition as AI is fondly addressed as – Will it be biased and discriminatory? Is encouraging the use of AI causing us to lose human interaction and connection? What about the digital divide – are we unknowingly fashioning more problems?

With many more unanswered questions and still dreaming about the bright future, I am reminded of a quote by Pedro Domingos “People worry that computers are too smart and have taken over the world whereas they are too stupid and they have taken over the world.”