Whether evidence is easy or hard to gather is a red herring. Patients present a body of evidence. Small or large, that evidence is what doctors and machines bot

Whether evidence is easy or hard to gather is a red herring. Patients present a body of evidence. Small or large, that evidence is what doctors and machines both use to generate diagnoses. The places where machines have the potential to excel is situating the evidence within a broader universe of evidence. The human body is amazingly complex, and it's unfair to hold it against human doctors that they don't have the capabilities to use the enormous amount of information we've collected on it so far. Machines do, though, and they're already on the brink of matching or exceeding human capabilities. It's true that medicine is more than generating diagnoses. But the years of training and huge personnel costs are caused by the advanced levels of knowledge required to perform with competence. The deprofessionalization of medicine means you can substitute expensive labor with much cheaper labor. There's also the value that comes from standardization. The best human doctors are probably going to surpass machine doctors in their chosen field of expertise for awhile yet. But very few people have access to the best human doctors, and the best human doctor in one area of specializaton is unlikely to be exceptional in areas outside his or her specialization. The proper comparison isn't against the best doctors, or even the average doctors: it's against the worst doctors who make terrible errors in judgment and doctors working outside their area of expertise, whose work will be most easily replaceable by Watson-like software.