Jason Wei: Radiologists Will Not Be Replaced by AI Anytime Soon, Because Demand Will Expand Alongside AI
Over the past few years, radiology has often been cited as a prime example of a job that AI would replace. In 2016, Geoff Hinton asserted that people should stop training radiologists, claiming that deep learning would outperform them within five years. Jason Wei offers a more cautious judgment in this blog post: while radiology will change over the next decade, radiologists will not be quickly automated away. His core argument is not that AI lacks capability, but rather that the structure of radiology work will first position AI as a triage tool, rather than replacing all image-reading tasks at once.
The first mechanism is the "jagged edge of intelligence." Jason Wei points out that language models excel in verifiable, data-rich common tasks but remain unstable in less common ones. Radiology is not a single task but an extremely multi-task domain: X-rays alone may involve at least a hundred diagnosable conditions, while CT and MRI involve thousands. AI will first master common, easily detectable diseases and will not automatically become proficient in rare diseases simply because the overall model improves. He argues that moving from a reliable triage tool to full automation will take at least three to five years even in the best-case scenario, because training AI on edge cases will be bottlenecked by data collection for rare diseases, and radiology is currently not a priority focus for frontier model laboratories.
The second mechanism is elastic demand, also known as the "Jevons paradox." Jason Wei considers this the most underestimated phenomenon in discussions about AI automation. He cites his own use of Claude Code as an example: when coding costs dropped, he asked the model to write a roughly 3,000-line HTML viewer to visualize every reinforcement learning run he performed. This illustrates that software work did not see reduced demand due to stronger AI; instead, more tools that were previously deemed not worth building became feasible. The same could happen in radiology: if the cost and latency of reading MRIs approach zero, doctors may order more scans preemptively to aid diagnosis. His illustrative estimate is that AI tools might allow radiologists to read only 20% of incoming scans, but the volume of incoming scans could increase fivefold. Many developing countries have fewer than one radiologist per million people and may also send significantly more imaging for interpretation.
Jason Wei further extends this demand expansion into the longer term. If image interpretation adds almost no waiting time, medical device companies will have incentives to manufacture cheaper, higher-frequency-use MRI machines, potentially even using them during surgeries. He also proposes a hypothetical: if a whole-body MRI cost only $100, he would prefer to get one monthly rather than biennially. This is not an already occurring fact, but an example used to demonstrate elastic demand. Following this logic, after radiology prices drop ten or a hundredfold, the number of preventive checks could rise substantially, meaning radiology work will not disappear just because individual image readings are automated.
Sources:Jason Wei