Role of Doctors
Next: Energy Industry Structure (new topic)
This is also last post in health thread for the moment. See also Health Flywheels added later.
Role of Doctors
When automation gets into the health sector with analysis, prescriptions and increasingly robot made operations, what will the new role of health professional be?
Will there be one?
Nothing is perfect and without proper maintenance systems start to drift. The data sets that are used to teach automations may contain errors, sometimes injected by purpose by adversaries. How can we be sure that the automatic world is producing the right outcomes?
Someone needs to monitor the automated health systems. The doctors of future need to take care of the health of the machines while machines increasingly take care of us. And you cannot do effective monitoring without years of practical experience in the field. There will always need to be human led medicine where a number of people from each generation learn the traditional skills of medical practitioners. How to make diagnosis by talking to patients, looking at swellings, listening to their lungs, taking heath beat, analysing imaging data and lab results. These skills are vital just because automations are so powerful. A world, where everything is done by the same set of automations, is fragile for errors. Slow and ineffective traditional stuff is the insurance against that.
There are other reasons why automations do not replace humans in medicine.
Machine learning models do not do new, difficult tasks. Nor are they good at completely unprecedented situations. They are used to automate tasks that we know how to do (at least that’s the state of the art now). That’s how they get trained, by showing large datasets of existing cases. From old data sets as training material, they learn to replicate what has already been done.
There will always be a frontier in medicine. New stuff that we are just learning to do. This needs to be driven doctors. Similarly, one cannot jump overnight in skills from zero to hero. Knowledge requires lots of practice, starting with simple stuff.
These doctors also need to practice hand-skills even when those tasks could cheaply be done by robots. This is the long road towards mastery that every generation must follow. And there will always be people who do not trust machines but prefer a human to operate on them. This is a perfect match between different needs.
As automations take care of much of treatments, the psychological and spiritual parts remain. It may also be that doctor’s role shifts towards those needs more than writing prescriptions.
So, most of the operations and medicine will be automated, always available and extremely cheap, but there is the manual alternative that may cost more, be more error prone but it fulfils two essential goals: doctors with practical skills can assess what machine do, detect if something starts going wrong in the automations and ones who can advance the state of art.