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 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.