5 ms·

I often wonder when the tipping point for white-collar specialists being replaced by machines will occur. Watson replacing doctors in making diagnoses has recei

I often wonder when the tipping point for white-collar specialists being replaced by machines will occur. Watson replacing doctors in making diagnoses has received a lot of attention, but there are many other fields. The big one for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers? We already have moved to replacing lawyers with computers for discovery, I would be even more pleased in negotiations to only have to change items flagged by machines than the sometimes incompetent lawyers I've had to deal with.

w1ntermute 13y ago
> The big one for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers? When the cost-risk equation comes out in favor of the computers.
VLM 13y ago
I was recently informed by an acquaintance that "lawyer work" decades ago was mostly about being a low to mid level manager over a herd of paralegals who did all the work by hand. As the market has collapsed, lawyers do all their own electronic searching and often data entry by themselves... The market has crushed the profession. Most likely that will eventually play out with doctors, probably economically enforced. Sure, doc, do whatever your medical judgement thinks best, if you want to work for free... but we're only paying on claims if your medical judgment matches "watson". So overproduce new docs for awhile to crater salaries, only pay claims if their work matches a computer model, and what we used to call a "nurse" will be the new "doctor". This also helps with doc-in-a-box facilities, which could now literally be a doc-in-a-box instead of a nurse-in-a-box or PA as implemented now. Eventually, being a "pharmacist" will mean being the minimum wage drone who stocks a semi-smart vending machine, or maybe it'll mean being the minimum wage drone answering the 800-number support line outsourced to the Philippines. I could see the same thing happening with accountants and HR and perhaps marketing.
- grey-area 13y ago
  I find this sort of bravado about replacing other professions really unconvincing - if you think you can replace lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, accountants, Marketing, and HR with software, why not the programmers themselves? If you think on why you can't replace programmers with software written by experts who know nothing about the domain (or even by those who do), it will tell you why the professions you've listed would be very hard to automate. I think software and the hardware it controls is going to be pervasive and take over a lot of formerly human functions in our society in the next century, but the professions you've listed above, along with programming, will be some of the last work to be completely automated, after manual labour, farming, cleaning, data-entry, call-centres, technical support, etc etc. It'd require strong AI to do replace those professions, expert systems don't come close, and if you think your profession is uniquely immune to these changes, why is that?
  - asadotzler 13y ago
    I agree with you. I also like to think that we have replaced, several times over, the original "programmers" with smarter and smarter silicon and the result is not fewer programmers, but orders of magnitude more. I think this will happen with other professions. Things which once required years of education and (often physical) practice, say delivering certain kinds of healthcare, will become heavily computer and robot assisted and we'll see some of them pushed from the expensive limited availability hospital to the much more widely available pharmacy -- or even to the shopping mall.
    - ams6110 13y ago
      Interesting point... you're saying that we might end up with more doctors and lawyers, because with the assistance of technology, anyone can be one?
  - georgemcbay 13y ago
    I'm not the OP you are responding to, but: 1) I do think software engineers are in danger of suffering the same fate, just later than some. We won't even be the last profession to go, that'll be comedians probably. 2) People often underestimate the impact of automation by looking at automation as a binary state where the problem comes when you automate away everyone, but that's not a great way to look at it. Partial automation on a quick enough timeline is more than enough to destabilize the economy of a particular industry. We are a long way from computers replacing all lawyers or doctors or software engineers, but if they can replace just 25% of them by allowing the remaining 75% to be as productive as the entire 100% was previously, that's already a large economic impact. If automation can replace 75% of them, that's a massive world-altering shift, economically. We really should be worrying about the economic impact of all this automation now, because at least in the USA (where I live) we are a very long way away from (sociopolitically) being able to deal with this quickly approaching new reality of having way more people than are needed for doing what would traditionally be considered "productive" work.
- HillRat 13y ago
  Well, that's kind of how things work now, which is why your physician sometimes has to check with your insurance carrier to see if they'll authorize work. For example, I recently saw a sports medicine doctor for what we feared was a supraspinatus tear. To diagnose that, we needed to order an MRI. My carrier signed off on the imaging, but it turns out that one of the other big carriers will refuse it as a matter of course until an x-ray has been performed. Now, my doctor has forty years of experience, and if she order an MRI it's because she already knows an x-ray won't return any useful information, and will just waste time, money and her patient's radiation exposure limit. But, statistically speaking, the carrier in question has obviously determined that they'll save money if they force providers to route through x-rays regardless. In other words, my provider's judgement was overridden by some Excel spreadsheet somewhere -- not even a Watson or Big Blue. Meanwhile, doctors are being forced to handle more data entry functions, something they understandably hate, and which has probably turned more providers against the Affordable Care Act than anything else. (The provisions are, IMHO, unduly onerous even as I understand the anti-fraud rationale behind their introduction, but that's another issue for another time.) Having said that, given the stringent requirements FDA places on med-tech, I don't anticipate AI providing more than a support role over the next few decades. FDA is always going to want a credentialed human in the critical chain between patient and procedure.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    As an aside, I wonder how many doctors will simply start to opt out of the ACA/health-insurance racket. I know of a few that work on a cash-only basis and they claim they are able to run their practices with vastly smaller staffs and able to spend more time with each patient and still be profitable.

w1ntermute 13y ago

> The big one for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers? When the cost-risk equation comes out in favor of the computers.

VLM 13y ago

I was recently informed by an acquaintance that "lawyer work" decades ago was mostly about being a low to mid level manager over a herd of paralegals who did all the work by hand. As the market has collapsed, lawyers do all their own electronic searching and often data entry by themselves... The market has crushed the profession. Most likely that will eventually play out with doctors, probably economically enforced. Sure, doc, do whatever your medical judgement thinks best, if you want to work for free... but we're only paying on claims if your medical judgment matches "watson". So overproduce new docs for awhile to crater salaries, only pay claims if their work matches a computer model, and what we used to call a "nurse" will be the new "doctor". This also helps with doc-in-a-box facilities, which could now literally be a doc-in-a-box instead of a nurse-in-a-box or PA as implemented now. Eventually, being a "pharmacist" will mean being the minimum wage drone who stocks a semi-smart vending machine, or maybe it'll mean being the minimum wage drone answering the 800-number support line outsourced to the Philippines. I could see the same thing happening with accountants and HR and perhaps marketing.

grey-area 13y ago
I find this sort of bravado about replacing other professions really unconvincing - if you think you can replace lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, accountants, Marketing, and HR with software, why not the programmers themselves? If you think on why you can't replace programmers with software written by experts who know nothing about the domain (or even by those who do), it will tell you why the professions you've listed would be very hard to automate. I think software and the hardware it controls is going to be pervasive and take over a lot of formerly human functions in our society in the next century, but the professions you've listed above, along with programming, will be some of the last work to be completely automated, after manual labour, farming, cleaning, data-entry, call-centres, technical support, etc etc. It'd require strong AI to do replace those professions, expert systems don't come close, and if you think your profession is uniquely immune to these changes, why is that?
- asadotzler 13y ago
  I agree with you. I also like to think that we have replaced, several times over, the original "programmers" with smarter and smarter silicon and the result is not fewer programmers, but orders of magnitude more. I think this will happen with other professions. Things which once required years of education and (often physical) practice, say delivering certain kinds of healthcare, will become heavily computer and robot assisted and we'll see some of them pushed from the expensive limited availability hospital to the much more widely available pharmacy -- or even to the shopping mall.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    Interesting point... you're saying that we might end up with more doctors and lawyers, because with the assistance of technology, anyone can be one?
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  I'm not the OP you are responding to, but: 1) I do think software engineers are in danger of suffering the same fate, just later than some. We won't even be the last profession to go, that'll be comedians probably. 2) People often underestimate the impact of automation by looking at automation as a binary state where the problem comes when you automate away everyone, but that's not a great way to look at it. Partial automation on a quick enough timeline is more than enough to destabilize the economy of a particular industry. We are a long way from computers replacing all lawyers or doctors or software engineers, but if they can replace just 25% of them by allowing the remaining 75% to be as productive as the entire 100% was previously, that's already a large economic impact. If automation can replace 75% of them, that's a massive world-altering shift, economically. We really should be worrying about the economic impact of all this automation now, because at least in the USA (where I live) we are a very long way away from (sociopolitically) being able to deal with this quickly approaching new reality of having way more people than are needed for doing what would traditionally be considered "productive" work.
HillRat 13y ago
Well, that's kind of how things work now, which is why your physician sometimes has to check with your insurance carrier to see if they'll authorize work. For example, I recently saw a sports medicine doctor for what we feared was a supraspinatus tear. To diagnose that, we needed to order an MRI. My carrier signed off on the imaging, but it turns out that one of the other big carriers will refuse it as a matter of course until an x-ray has been performed. Now, my doctor has forty years of experience, and if she order an MRI it's because she already knows an x-ray won't return any useful information, and will just waste time, money and her patient's radiation exposure limit. But, statistically speaking, the carrier in question has obviously determined that they'll save money if they force providers to route through x-rays regardless. In other words, my provider's judgement was overridden by some Excel spreadsheet somewhere -- not even a Watson or Big Blue. Meanwhile, doctors are being forced to handle more data entry functions, something they understandably hate, and which has probably turned more providers against the Affordable Care Act than anything else. (The provisions are, IMHO, unduly onerous even as I understand the anti-fraud rationale behind their introduction, but that's another issue for another time.) Having said that, given the stringent requirements FDA places on med-tech, I don't anticipate AI providing more than a support role over the next few decades. FDA is always going to want a credentialed human in the critical chain between patient and procedure.
- ams6110 13y ago
  As an aside, I wonder how many doctors will simply start to opt out of the ACA/health-insurance racket. I know of a few that work on a cash-only basis and they claim they are able to run their practices with vastly smaller staffs and able to spend more time with each patient and still be profitable.