How Robots will Replace Doctors
Seth Wenig - AP | It’s now Dr. Watson, we presume. IBM’s “Jeopardy!” ace is now being used by health insurerer WellPoint to help diagnose and treat medical problems. |
by Ezra Klein | The Washington Post
Farhad Manjoo has a provocative thesis on the future of medicine: Robots will take the jobs. And not just the bottom-rung of jobs. “The doctors who are the juiciest targets for automation might not be the ones you’d expect,” he writes. They’re not the nurses or the primary-care docs. “They’re specialists like my wife — the most highly trained, highly paid people in medicine.”
As Atul Gawande wrote in “The Checklist Manifesto,” “the ninth edition of the World Health Organization’s international classification of diseases has grown to distinguish more than thirteen thousand different diseases, syndromes, and types of injury.” And that doesn’t take into account all the possible symptoms and recommended lab tests and side effects of, and interactions between, various medications. That’s complexity beyond any human’s capacity to handle. But it’s not beyond a computer’s ability.
Manjoo suggests robots are built for surgery. Read the entire article