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In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we'd never suspected possible—they'll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your m
by georgieporgie 15y ago
In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we'd never suspected possible—they'll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one.
That's really, really optimistic. The only one which seems plausible (and probably a great idea in terms of eliminating human error) in the reasonably near term is dispensing medicine. As in taking a clearly encoded prescription from a verified doctor and dispensing precisely the drug indicated. That still, though, won't eliminate the pharmacist, just a few of the technicians.
As for diagnosing diseases, they were working on expert systems to do that since the 70's. It has hope to be a great tool, but the doctor is still responsible for interpreting the statements of the patient, recognizing symptoms, and feeding the correct data into the system.
I don't see skilled knowledge workers being threatened for quite awhile. If I were going to spread FUD about automation, I would be pointing at RedBox and saying that it's paving the way toward automating low-end service jobs.
- baddox 15y agoAs I understand it, expert system can be quite accurate and effective in diagnosis (if fed accurate input of symptoms, which would still require a physician or at least a trained technician). The problem is always public perception and liability. Medicine is as much about instilling people with confidence as it is with actually healing them. Some (most?) people would shy away from the idea of an automated diagnosis. Also, a bad diagnosis (even if it was caused by improper input into the expert system) introduces a quagmire of liability.
- spc476 15y agoOdd, the results of MYCIN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin) were more accurate than doctors, and that was with 70s computer technology. And while not as nearly entertaining to watch as House, MYCIN was probably much easier to get along with.
- georgieporgie 15y agoMYCIN diagnoses only infectious diseases, and does so only with a considerable amount of human input. IMO that doesn't really constitute replacing people. It's basically an interactive book of diseases combined with a statistical analysis expert.
- ippisl 15y agoHis story(second part) gives an example of a robotic system that did the work previously done by 50 pharmacists. so this is not just a theoretical case.
- georgieporgie 15y agoI assume you mean this one: http://www.slate.com/id/2304445/ http://www.slate.com/id/2304445/ Before installing the robot, UCSF needed about half of its more than 100 on-staff pharmacists to administer and check the drugs going out to patients on the floor; now nearly all have been reassigned to different parts of the hospital, where they make IVs, help adjust patients' drug regimens, and perform other tasks that had been neglected when they were simply filling prescriptions As mentioned there, and later in the article, the pharmacists (and I'm not entirely convinced that they were all pharmacists, as opposed to pharmacist technicians) were freed from their mundane, pill-counting tasks and put out on the floor of the hospital to monitor and "fine-tune" patients' drug regimens. The article basically lays out how pharmacists had jobs which were largely filled with extremely repetitive tasks -- billing, prescription input, pill counting -- and less of what they're important for, which is counseling patients. A computer isn't going to be able to replace a human in patient interaction, medical demand is rising, and I don't see that he made a case for future pharmacist demand not meeting the projected 17% (if I recall correctly) growth. It just sounds like being a pharmacist sucks a lot less now.