What would it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his voice? The Little Mermaid, in Hans Christian Andersen’s original telling, makes such a wager in an attempt to leave behind her mermaid nature and join the world of men.
For the chance to become human, fall in love and acquire an immortal soul, she trades her voice, her most prized possession, knowing that it will never return.
Today, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), we face a similar dilemma. By allowing machines to speak and think for us, we can escape the limits of human intelligence and the time and toil human processing demands. But if this costs us our voices, will the bargain be worth it?
The question is a very real one in my own field of work: medicine. In recent years, the medical field has seen an explosion of AI note-writing, a resource I would have longed for as a young medical student. Now, an AI tool can record a patient encounter on a smartphone, generate a well-organized summary of the patient’s history, and synthesize recommendations and treatment plans according to the user’s preferred style and formatting. The physician simply needs to
