No Mastery without the Machine - Medical Education in the Age of Clinical AI

AbstractAI is often framed as a threat to medical education owing to concerns it may diminish the cognitive struggle through which trainees traditionally develop clinical judgment - a legitimate but incomplete concern. Medicine has never been defined by unaided human cognition; it has been defined by the obligation to use the best available tools in the service of patients. As AI systems increasingly extend not only clinicians' perception, but also their reasoning, medical mastery may shift from memorization and independent synthesis toward the orchestration, supervision, and calibrated deference to intelligent systems. The task for medical education is therefore not to preserve cognitive struggle for its own sake, but to refocus it from recalling facts to interrogating machine reasoning, detecting failure modes, and knowing when human intervention improves care versus when it merely interrupts a better system.