India, Oct. 17 -- A doctor asks an AI system a question. Within seconds, it produces an answer that looks authoritative, cites research and sounds convincing.

The difficult question comes next: should anyone act on it?

That question may matter more for the future of AI in health care than how sophisticated the underlying technology becomes.

Much of the discussion about AI in health care is still about capability. Can it identify a disease? Read an image? Analyse a patient record? Search thousands of research papers? Discover a drug? For many of these questions, the answer is increasingly yes.

But capability is not evidence.

Health care depends on a chain of trust. Research has to be conducted well. Its findings have to be scrutinised...