All being said and done with respect to AI in medicine, Doctors and medical professionals will be the very last people to be replaced. Care (both physical and mental) will be the last bastion of humanity disrupted by AI.
Medical practice is very knowledge intensive, especially general practice. Very prone to human error, have you seen the stats on accidental deaths in hospitals? Excellent high-value use for (future) learning systems which can ingest and apply a large body of knowledge and reason in the face of a huge poorly understood graph of causal factors.
No, the last people to be replaced will be those doing unpaid labour, such as parenting, household chores, unpaid elder care: there's the least economic incentive to do so. So I do agree in large part with your final sentence.
It is technically possible today for patients in hospital to have their food delivered by robot, yet most people would have a strong aversion to that idea: the presence of other humans helps us to have the will to get better.
I choose my GP based on my ability to trust and empathize with him, not because of his grades in medical school.
Medicine is an intrinsically human activity. It may be augmented and improved by AI, but people are still going to want human medics around, it’s just the nature of being sick.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be assisted by technology. A large part of medicine is ordering tests, interpreting results, analyzing imagery, proposing medicine courses, records, pathology, etc. Anesthesiologists are crucial care but basically do their jobs by monitoring signals and adjusting dosing accordingly. That’s like ideal machine skills and no one has a relationship with their anesthesiologist- they’re asleep.
I agree the direct interface to a lot of medicine needs to be a human as we need human assurance when we are sick and scared. Bed side manner can’t be replace to devalued. But we suffer from critical shortages of medical workers, many of whom can be augmented powerfully with knowledge machines.
My understanding is the real barrier is providers themselves find the user interfaces counter intuitive, aren’t afforded time to train on new systems, and are under so much pressure to produce with such a limited staff they can’t spend the time and energy to work these tools into their workflows. Add on to that the regulatory hurdles to innovation, general risk aversion in the development field, complexities of selling unproven tech into unsophisticated hospital network administration, etc, it’s no wonder it’s a slow slog. It’ll take someone like Kaiser really committing material capital, time, resources, and mandating adoption with a significant training program to see any success.
> It is technically possible today for patients in hospital to have their food delivered by robot, yet most people would have a strong aversion to that idea
That's a matter of personal preference. I prefer self-service checkout in the grocery store even if there's an unused staffed checkout. Generally, I prefer robots and AIs wherever they are available.
That's because you have no way to evaluate the efficacy of different GPs. If you knew with certainty there were a superhuman AI that's performing 100x better than human doctors (and costs 100x less), you would absolutely choose the AI doctor over the human one every time. And if you don't, your kids (or grandkids) will.
I wish to live in your beautiful country filled with loving doctors doting on you with motherly care, because I definitely would prefer asking a bot for meds.
On the contrary, critical scenarios is exactly where tech and AI helps a lot.
You'd think Pilot would be the last type of 'vehicle driver' that would be automated. On the contrary, they were the first to adopt almost 100% self-driving.
> mental
We are finding curious things like 'playing tetris is the most effective way to avoid trauma'. Doctors will help in lab and diagnostic work, but the inference of what solution to administer might actually come from an AI. Ofc, similar to flight, the most challenging situations will still be 'manned' (like fighter jets or non-routine surgery)
Healthcare is inaccessible and understaffed in most parts of the world. If AI doctors can be better than the bottom-10-percentile doctor coming out of a US med-school, then they should be adopted wholesale.
They won't be replaced, but doctors are becoming both more expensive and increasingly harder to get access to, so having a cheap and scalable baseline to diagnose the common problems seems like a good thing?
So far WebMD with its entire algorithm being if(symptom) return "cancer"; has somewhat destroyed all public faith in these sorts of systems, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to get done to a useful degree.
