In my previous post, I argued that the future of artificial intelligence will require something more sophisticated than the slogans “accelerate” or “slow down.” Some areas may indeed require stronger guardrails and even deliberate pacing. But others may demand exactly the opposite.
Medicine is one of them.
A recent Wall Street Journal report offers a remarkable glimpse of what artificial intelligence is already doing for patients with rare and difficult-to-diagnose diseases. These are often people who spend years moving from doctor to doctor without an answer, sometimes being told that nothing serious is wrong while their condition continues to progress.
AI is beginning to shorten that diagnostic odyssey.
One mother, Rachel Hinken, had spent years wondering why her son Oliver was unusually small and missing important developmental milestones. Physicians repeatedly reassured her that he would catch up. Eventually she uploaded his photograph to Face2Gene, an AI-assisted tool that uses facial characteristics to identify possible genetic disorders.
The system suggested a rare condition called Trichorhinophalangeal syndrome. Genetic testing later confirmed not only that her son had the disorder, but that she had it as well.
After years of uncertainty, an algorithm helped point doctors toward the answer.
Other examples are equally striking. Physicians treating POTS, a difficult neurological condition, report that patients who previously might have gone decades without a diagnosis are increasingly arriving at specialists after AI chatbots helped them recognize patterns in their symptoms.
From a Catholic perspective, this is exactly the kind of artificial intelligence we should want to develop faster. Medicine itself is one of the clearest examples of human reason placed at the service of life. Hospitals, nursing, medical missions and care for the sick have occupied a privileged place in Christian civilization because healing the suffering person is not merely an economic activity. It is an act of mercy.
If AI can help physicians see what they previously could not see, we should ask how to make it safer, better and more widely available.
Because a technology capable of identifying a life-threatening disease months or years earlier should not be trapped behind unnecessary barriers simply because AI, in other fields, presents genuine dangers. Prudence does not mean applying the same brake everywhere.
Sometimes prudence requires acceleration.
The Journal article also contains the necessary warning. These systems still make mistakes. They are constrained by the quality of the data on which they are trained, and rare diseases by definition have fewer cases, fewer images and fewer digitized records available.
One clinical geneticist quoted in the article makes the proper distinction: AI can search across far more information, far faster than any individual physician, but human beings remain necessary for synthesis and final judgment.
And there is something almost beautiful about that. The more AI assumes some of the enormous burden of searching medical literature, recognizing complex patterns and processing diagnostic information, the more medicine could potentially recover what bureaucracy and modern healthcare systems have often squeezed out of it: time for the patient.
There are certainly areas where frontier AI capabilities may require carefully designed brakes. Autonomous cyber systems, biological risks, recursive AI development and other potentially catastrophic applications deserve serious oversight.
So, regulation has two moral dangers: allowing dangerous technology to advance recklessly, and preventing beneficial technology from reaching people who need it.
Catholic prudence must be capable of seeing both.
Let AI analyze scans and ECGs for patterns no physician has encountered before; but let the doctor remain the doctor: the person who verifies, judges, explains, accompanies and accepts responsibility.
That is a division of labor worth encouraging.