S1, E33 - Ted Shortliffe, MD, PhD: 50 Years of Clinical AI

Ted Shortliffe built MYCIN at Stanford in the 1970s, one of the first medical AI systems ever deployed in a clinical setting. Five decades later, he joins Steve and Leon to examine what has persisted in clinical decision support — above all, the demand for explainability — what has changed (computational power finally caught up to the ideas), and what the field may have lost along the way. The conversation includes a direct response to Bob Wachter's claim from S1E24 that AI in healthcare decision support was "too hard a problem to start with," and a case for why structured knowledge representation deserves a second look in the age of LLMs. For anyone tracing the arc of medical AI history, this episode is a rare primary source.