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Associate Professor Daniel Ting shares why that’s the wrong question to ask
Robotic surgery has been a standard of care in Singapore's hospitals for over two decades. But robots, for all their precision, shared a fundamental limitation — they moved where the surgeon directed. They knew nothing about what they were doing. Artificial intelligence changed that. Where robots extended the human hand, AI began to extend something far more complex: the capacity to analyse, predict, and communicate.
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For Associate Professor Daniel Ting, Director of the SingHealth AI Office and Chief Data and Digital Officer at the Singapore National Eye Centre, it is more about leveraging AI’s capabilities – speed, capacity, pattern recognition etc. – to enable humans to be more efficient, productive and ironically, to be more human.
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Most AI models today solve a single disease exceptionally well — but healthcare institutions end up maintaining multiple disconnected systems across specialties. MerMED-FM takes a different approach, bringing together diverse forms of medical imaging within one unified platform. For clinicians, this means fewer fragmented workflows. Its implications extend beyond Singapore, with collaborations such as the one with Bhutan expanding access to specialist care.
“Can AI replace doctors? My answer is a soft no,” he says. “The very foundation of healthcare is the human touch — physical comfort, empathy, emotional support. AI will never replace these.”
His greater concern is how clinicians are trained alongside AI — guarding against de-skilling, mis-skilling, and never-skilling. Tomorrow's clinicians must develop AI literacy: not merely understanding how tools work, but knowing how to question them and recognise their limitations.
This article was first published on 9 September 2026.
“The future of healthcare will not pivot to one that replaces humans with machines. It is focused on harnessing technology to make healthcare more human.”
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