From Hippocrates to Artificial Intelligence: Moving Towards a Collective Intelligence


Carlos María Galmarini at Open Mind: “Modern medicine is based upon the work of Hippocrates and his disciples and is compiled in more than 70 books comprising the Hippocratic body of work. In its essence, these writings declare that any illness originates with natural causes. Therefore, medicine must be based on detailed observation, reason, and experience in order to establish a diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. The Hippocratic tradition stresses the importance of the symptoms and the clinical exam. As a result, medicine abandoned superstition and the magic performed by priest-doctors, and it was transformed into a real, experience-based science….

A complementary combination of both intelligences (human and artificial) could help overcome the other’s shortcomings and limitations. As we incorporate intelligent technologies into medical processes, a new, more powerful form of collaboration will emerge. Analogous to the past when the automation of human tasks completely changed the known world and ignited an evolution in the offering of products and services, the combination of human and artificial intelligence will create a new type of collective intelligence capable of building more efficient organizations, and in the healthcare industry, it will be able to solve problems that until now have been unfathomable to the human mind alone.

Finally, it is worth remembering that fact based sciences are divided into natural and human disciplines. Medicine occupies a special place, straddling both. It can be difficult to establish the similarities between a doctor who works, for example, with rules defined by specific clinical trials and a traditional family practitioner. The former would be more related to a natural science, and the latter with a more human science – “the art of medicine.”

The combination of human and artificial intelligence in a new type of collective intelligence will enable doctors themselves to be a combination of the two. In other words, the art of medicine – human science – based on the analysis of big data – natural science. A new collective intelligence working on behalf of a wiser medicine….(More)”.