Digitization is the emerging process in the current transformation of industry. Understanding the role and socio-economic consequences of digitalization is crucial for the way technology is being deployed in each sector. One of the affected sectors is dentistry. This study highlights the current advances and challenges in integrating and merging artificial intelligence (AI), intelligence augmentation (IA), and machine learning (ML) in dentistry. We conduct a comparative analysis to give an overview of which technology is being currently deployed and what role IA and AI will play in dentistry, as AI plays an assistive role in advancing human capabilities. We find that challenges range from AI finding its way into routine medical practice to qualitative challenges of retrieving adequate data input. Other challenges lie in the yet unanswered questions of liability in how to reduce deployment costs of new technology. Given these challenges, we provide an outlook of how future technology can be deployed in daily-life dentistry and how robots and humans will interact, given the current technology developments. The aim of this paper is to discuss the future of dentistry and whether it is AI or IA conquering the modern dentistry era.

Multitudinous health data are continually being produced as our activities, including medicine, evolve into the digital age where data plays a decisive role. Challenges come along as well, concerning the collection, secure storage, verification and secure access to the continuously growing data at such a broad scale before valuable information can be extracted to contribute to medical advancement nowadays. With the decentralization feature, huge successes of blockchain technology in overcoming similar challenges in the finance and cryptocurrency sector brought us the confidence to investigate and reveal its immeasurable potential for the health sector, specifically in dentistry. Dentistry is an important area of healthcare, but there is relatively little research focusing on its interactions with blockchain technology. Given the limited amount of existing research on this specific subject, this paper focuses on blockchain in dentistry and aims to provide a conceptual framework for the possible applications of blockchain in dentistry. The framework is organised by different areas of dentistry operations so that dental professionals can easily refer to and identify areas of interest. This contributes to increasing the awareness of blockchain technology among dental professionals and promoting blockchain-empowered revolutions in dentistry. This paper also discusses how blockchain fits alongside other emerging technologies, the challenges that have to be overcome to maximise the functionality and efficiency of this technology, as well as future research directions concerning blockchain implementations in the dental industry.