Opinion | AI Needs Old-School Minds

As a proud alumnus of the University of Chicago, I found Paul Alivisatos’s op-ed particularly resonant (“Teach Students to Think With, Without and About AI,” Sept. 21). I was fortunate to have been a medical student there during the non-AI era when my classmates and I were expected to acquire knowledge the old-fashioned way. We went to the library, looked up references, read them and stored our newly acquired information in our brains.

In the late 1980s, I began creating intelligent programs to improve electronic fetal monitoring. Had I not been exposed to the old-fashioned approaches for knowledge building, critical reasoning, hypothesis generation and testing, I could never have made the best use of those programs to engage my curiosity and to arrive at meaningful solutions for challenging clinical problems.

Em. Prof. Lawrence D. Devoe, M.D.

Medical College of Georgia

Augusta, Ga.