PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Ezio Di Nucci TI - Should we be afraid of medical AI? AID - 10.1136/medethics-2018-105281 DP - 2019 Aug 01 TA - Journal of Medical Ethics PG - 556--558 VI - 45 IP - 8 4099 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/45/8/556.short 4100 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/45/8/556.full SO - J Med Ethics2019 Aug 01; 45 AB - I analyse an argument according to which medical artificial intelligence (AI) represents a threat to patient autonomy—recently put forward by Rosalind McDougall in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The argument takes the case of IBM Watson for Oncology to argue that such technologies risk disregarding the individual values and wishes of patients. I find three problems with this argument: (1) it confuses AI with machine learning; (2) it misses machine learning’s potential for personalised medicine through big data; (3) it fails to distinguish between evidence-based advice and decision-making within healthcare. I conclude that how much and which tasks we should delegate to machine learning and other technologies within healthcare and beyond is indeed a crucial question of our time, but in order to answer it, we must be careful in analysing and properly distinguish between the different systems and different delegated tasks.