What Do We Become: The Transformative Nature of Technology in Medical Education

Abstract

The article is based on the ASME Gold Medal Address the author gave in Edinburgh in July 2025, and it explores the transformative nature of technology use and the lessons learned regarding what we become when we do use these tools and systems. Educational technologies are still sometimes used in ways that augment classroom and bedside learning, but they are rarely the focus of the conversation about technology in medical education. There is more investment in administrative, tracking and reporting technologies than in educational technologies. Indeed, on the surface, medical education today looks very similar to the way it looked decades ago, but what is happening underneath is quite different. Ambient technology means massive ambient surveillance but not by medical schools. Technology also supports backchannels between learners at different institutions and differentiated learning teams, which again do not seem to be issues that schools are attending to. This is all exacerbated by the rapid adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies. Given that the capabilities of a learner using technology are not the same as those of a learner not using technology and that education is all about altering capability states, why do medical educators not attend to tracking capability states (both actual and perceived)? When technology helps us to do certain things, it is always at a price. Medical educators need to better understand how technologies change beliefs, values, perceptions, customs and cultures that are central to training tomorrow's doctors.

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