What I Told The Next Generation Of Physicians About The Future Of Medicine

Seventeen years after my own medical graduation, I returned to the University of Debrecen to address its newest physicians. I wanted to offer them a way to think about a profession being reshaped by artificial intelligence, while keeping the patient at its centre. Here is how I approached the speech, followed by the full text.

On September 19, 2026, I had the honour of giving a speech at the medical graduation ceremony of the University of Debrecen. In the Ceremonial Courtyard of the university’s Main Building, graduates of the Faculty of Medicine gathered to mark the end of years of study and clinical training, and the beginning of their lives as physicians.

Seventeen years earlier, I had been sitting where they were sitting.

What I remember most clearly from my own graduation is a single word. One of the professors on stage addressed us as “colleagues.” It was a welcome into a community, but it also made the responsibility of becoming a physician feel real.

Returning to speak to a new generation brought that memory back. It also gave me the starting point for a difficult question: what could I say about the future that would be useful to someone becoming a doctor today?

How I approached the challenge

A graduation speech gives you only a few minutes at a moment that belongs to the graduates. They have spent years working towards this day. Ahead of them are new responsibilities, difficult decisions and a profession that will keep changing throughout their careers.

For me, the challenge was to bring the perspective of a medical futurist into that moment without turning the speech into a lecture about technology. The tools available today will change. The questions these graduates learn to ask about them will remain useful much longer.

I built the speech around three ideas.

The first was that we will have to learn together. These graduates are entering a world in which patients have increasing access to information, digital health tools and AI. That changes relationships as much as it changes clinical workflows. Experience matters enormously, but even experienced physicians are still learning how to navigate this environment. I wanted to acknowledge that openly.

The second was that their training deserves to be used well. Years of medical education should lead to opportunities to exercise judgment, ask better questions, recognise what the data leaves out and understand another person’s needs. My message was to challenge repetitive work that could be performed appropriately by an algorithm, and to be fully present for the work that requires them.

The third was that greater technological capability comes with responsibility. I invited the graduates to imagine what Vesalius, Fleming or Semmelweis might have done with the tools available to us. Those questions open up a sense of possibility. They also lead to a practical question every physician will need to answer: which uses of technology actually serve the patient?

I ended where I began, with the word “colleague.” Seventeen years into my own journey, I understand that word differently. Joining the profession means joining the search for answers—with our patients and with one another.

Below is the full English version of my speech.

My speech to the medical graduates of the University of Debrecen

September 19, 2026

Dear Colleagues,

It is a great pleasure to welcome you on the occasion of your medical graduation. Seventeen years ago, at my own graduation ceremony, I was sitting where you are sitting today. And I still remember clearly the moment when one of the professors speaking on stage addressed us for the first time as colleagues.

It was just one word, but it meant a great deal to me. It was an honor to join the international community of physicians, a community with a history spanning thousands of years. And perhaps for the first time, in that very same moment, I also truly felt the weight of the responsibility that comes with this profession.

But the world we entered as physicians back then was very different from the one in which you are beginning your careers today.

As The Medical Futurist, I tend to look at medicine from a somewhat unusual perspective. I try to take a bird’s-eye view to observe how it changes over time and how we can better prepare. And today, we are living through one of the greatest cultural paradigm shifts in the history of medicine.

Because of smartphones, telemedicine, digital health technologies, and now generative artificial intelligence, or AI, patients are increasingly becoming members of the medical team.

This represents a cultural shock for both sides. But it is also an extraordinary opportunity: an opportunity to build better relationships with our patients, to involve them more deeply in managing their own health, and to share with them some of the almost unbearable burden of decision-making that physicians have so often tried to carry alone.

This is also the opportunity of your generation.

You will practice a form of medicine woven through with technologies that previous generations of physicians never encountered. At a time when more than one and a half billion patients and physicians are already using AI, the doctors who are older than you do not have all the answers or solutions either.

We will learn how to use these technologies together.

At the same time, I understand that when you look toward the future, you may not always see this optimistic picture. You may instead see a large shadow on the horizon, and we do not yet know whether it will remain a shadow or ultimately allow even more light to come through.

That shadow is AI itself.

As an AI researcher, I read almost every day about how this extraordinarily powerful technology will replace physicians; how it will become cheaper, faster, and more accurate than we are. On the other side, there are those who fear that technology will take away precisely what makes medicine an art.

After thousands of hours spent analyzing this question, there is one thing I am certain of: neither scenario accurately describes what lies ahead.

AI will take over well-defined, repetitive, data-driven tasks. And we should be glad about that. In fact, I would ask something of you: fight against every task that an algorithm can perform just as well. You did not study for all these years to copy data from one system into another. You did not become physicians to perform repetitive tasks that do not require your knowledge, judgment, creativity, or empathy.

But when the task does require you, be truly present and let your expertise shine. Ask the question the algorithm did not ask. Notice what is missing from the data. Be there for your patient when what they need is not simply information, but understanding.

And let me close with a thought from the perspective of a futurist.

When I see the rise of advanced technologies, I do not think primarily about what it might take away from us. I find the opposite question far more interesting: What might it give us, if we learn to use it well?

What might Andreas Vesalius have been capable of nearly five hundred years ago, as he mapped the human body, if he had had access to the knowledge and technologies that we can now reach within seconds?

How much faster might Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin have travelled from the laboratory to the patient’s bedside if he had had access to tools that may soon become part of your everyday medical practice?

How much easier might it have been for Ignaz Semmelweis to analyze millions of data points with the help of AI and demonstrate to the world what he had already understood?

You have opportunities ahead of you that previous generations of physicians could not even have imagined. But that does not make your responsibility any smaller.

With every new tool, it will be up to you to decide what it should be used for. What truly serves the patient? What genuinely makes medicine better? And when should every technology be put aside so that you can simply sit beside another human being and listen?

Seventeen years ago, when I was first addressed as a colleague, I had no idea where this profession would take me. Today, I understand that the word colleague does not mean that we are finished, or that we already have all the answers to our patients’ questions. It means that from now on, we search for those answers together.

Together with our patients, together with one another, and now, together with you.

Dear Colleagues, my wish for you on this remarkable journey is that you preserve your curiosity, make full use of everything you have learned here, and never lose sight of the person who gives all of this its meaning: the patient.

And may you always have the courage to embrace everything the future places in your hands.

Congratulations, and I wish you all the success for that!