I have also encountered doctors I did not like but fortunately for me I had a choice where to go. Maybe machine learning should focus on weeding out unpopular practitioners instead.
However, since there are so many applicants, schools have no choice but to cut all below a certain GPA. This has an effect on the pool of applicants and the schools are trying to mitigate that.
In my opinion, technology will help reduce the cognitive load sustained by doctors, driving error rates down and simplifying medical education, allowing the professional to focus more on the relationship with the patient.
Many specialized guidelines contain actual algorithms: objective and subjective signals to look for, their interpretation and evidence-based recommendations based on them. In one instance in my education, this manifested in the form of giant lookup tables. I was expected to memorize them and keep doing it again and again when they inevitably change in a few years. To me it was like trying to memorize a highly dynamic version of the periodic table of elements.
One look at it and I knew a computer could fully implement its logic yet my classmates think I'm crazy for even suggesting it. I say let the computer remember that stuff. It won't replace all of medicine, certainly won't substitute for a proper understanding of the disease... But the act of mapping objective data to evidence-based conduct should really have been abstracted away long ago. The electronic medical records system should bring up these guidelines the moment the physician types the data in. If the doctor types in anthropometric data like BMI and other relevant measurements and they indicate obesity, the system should be able to suggest a proper conduct.
Unless they're used in emergency situations where time is essential, doctors shouldn't have to memorize magic numbers much less entire tables of them. With one less thing to cram, maybe school wouldn't be so stressful, doctors would make less mistakes and would also make more time for actually caring about the patient.
Right now, a really rude doctor will be tolerated within the system because of their technical knowledge, diagnostic skills, surgical skills, etc. But if all that other stuff is performed by machines, and we just have nurses, etc., there to tend to patients, explain things to them, and generally provide a human touch, I'd expect that very rude human employees would no longer be tolerated.
Would it have mattered to you if a machine interpreted the results and a nurse, fully versed in the specialty, had a consultation with you and guided you through the treatment process?
It seems like the bigger issue here is having some warmth of some sort in the situation - which I think is where medicine is really going, at least in the way we experience it. Computers and machines to do the hard diagnosis, with educated humans guiding other humans through. I believe we'll have less unpopular practitioners because we'll be able to spend more time teaching bedside manner and communication skills.
The obvious rebuttal which is common is: "why not have a compassionate human read the machine results/analysis/interpretation/prescription?"
To which I respond, how much are you willing to pay to have someone read to you?
Instead, I think we'll see more powerful diagnostic tools at the disposal for physicians to use. Doctors will still play an important role in treating their patients and will be more effective because they'll have powerful tools assisting them.
But to your point, will technology help patients feel more empowered in their medical encounters? Or to get more value out of their interactions with their doctors? https://www.remedymedical.com/ seems to think their platform will do just that for primary care / telemedicine visits.
I get into this argument with people a lot.
I say something like, "Self driving cars will replace all the transport jobs" and the pedant says, "Well they won't replace ALL the transport jobs, so argument null and void." But no shit they won't replace ALL the transport jobs, if they replace even 30% of them, that's huge. Highest unemployment during "The Great Depression" was ~25%. I think in the case of transportation it will be more like 80% fewer transportation jobs in 10 years, something like that.
With doctors and hospitals, if there were better incentives in place promoting any level of efficiency, we would have less need for doctors (and hospital staff in general). I agree that we won't see 100% automation. But a hospital finding it can do more and better work with 50% less staff? I could see that being a possibility in our near future, with the caveat that it won't happen in the US due to the regulatory environment and incentives in healthcare.
Countries outside of the US might be more open to the idea of efficiency in healthcare.
There are fewer accountants today because of tax software and Excel spreadsheets. They are still needed for more complex and unique situations, but there will be a lot fewer of them. The local H&R Block uses lower paid "Tax Preparers" instead.
There are a lot of research done about Walmart and about when the store moved into town there were not fewer jobs, but somehow the area got poorer. What they found was that the local community leaders(small business owners, lawyers, accountants) were automated away and/or moved to Walmart headquarters.
http://aese.psu.edu/nercrd/economic-development/for-research...
Is one I could find, but that also references other papers in the field.
This leads to me understand that like Walmart, the simple human physical labor jobs will remain long after the more skilled positions. The main reason, I believe, is that software is simply cheaper than hardware(robots) so highly skilled positions which require software not hardware to remove will be the first to go. This is exacerbated by the fact that the software replaceable jobs are the highest paid and therefore the most profitable to remove.
Very much this. This is how we'll be able to replace general practitioners with, at first, nurses with a bit of extra schooling - and then nurses with a 4 year degree... and then with a 2 year degree. Yet we'll still see surgeons for some time because it takes robotics or some other scientific breakthrough to replace them.
Programming, machine learning: it's constantly being automated, which leads to paradigm shifts. Those new paradigms are then studied, understood, and automated. Automation is about "not doing the same thing over and over again so you can solve new problems."
Programming, games: I'm giving a talk later this month about automating game production with machine learning. You can't really use machine learning to be "creative" yet, but you can use it to generate novel game assets, which is actually where most of the time is spent in game dev. There's also a lot of pipeline improvements that could be made by existing tools companies, most notably Adobe and Autodesk. So the upshot is it will be possible for small teams to create much more expansive game worlds. Make GTA V for $1M instead of $260M kind of thing. But even then, the history of game design has been automating different pieces -- it's basically the reason for the existence of game engines.
Starting businesses: This is controversial, but I think entrepreneurship is the highest intellectual endeavor. It requires you to apply everything you've learned about life, the universe, and everything in ways that most people haven't thought of. I think you'd need a very real AGI to do this; although I suppose I could see an algo running P&G or J&J and making decisions about what brands to invest in and divest from, along with how to market based on what people are saying on social media, stuff like that.
Eventually urgent cares and ER will install them for people directly. No reason the machine can't prescribe antibiotics for the latest form of strep that is going around. That leaves the doctor for the hard cases where the machine doesn't know.
I would assume these challenges aren't unique to Canada and from an outsider's perspective the medical system in the US seems worse (maybe not if you're rich)
I think most people in AI are more surprised that it took this long. The tech has been there for decades for a pretty large percentage of routine diagnostics, especially carefully defined clinical-sample type diagnostics. People were pretty sure in the '80s that it'd all be automated soon, but it never managed to make it into actual hospitals so funding dried up. Mixture of bureaucracy, legal issues, patients not liking the idea of computer diagnosis, doctors not liking the idea of computer diagnosis, incentives, etc.
I think changes in all those "environmental" factors are likely to be the biggest boost to something like this getting deployed in practice. Tech advances are good as well, and will expand the range of diagnostics that can be automated, but there is already enough low-hanging fruit in medicine that is easy enough for any of a half-dozen AI techniques to do it, that I don't think tech is actually the bottleneck.
Overall AI will ease the demand for human doctors, maybe not overnight, but gradually yet quickly. Cheaper healthcare for all, thinner salary for doctors, I will say not a bad deal overall.
What I find people miss here is that computers will not help you heal your boo-boos. Say you get stabbed in the face with a knife. You need a doctor to help you. Or to give birth.
And I don't why you bring up the spokesperson stuff, it doesn't need to.
I feel bad for the rest of the people who visit my clinic and have to deal with any of the other garbage practitioners who usually fall into one of two buckets. Foreign (mainly Indian) hacks with zero medical knowledge and bedside manners, and greedy yuppie strivers with a knack for memorization but terrible analytical ability.
Most doctors don't deserve their inflated salaries or social status, and I hope they are soon brought back down to Earth by technology, they have been able to skid by for way too long.
Mind you I'm not talking about researchers, who will always have a job. I'm talking about practitioners. I've had a medical condition from birth and I've had to deal with my share of doctors. Outside of the insurance system, they are easily the most unpleasant part of the whole ordeal to deal with. There are some gems, but most you will encounter are pompous, arrogant, and "commanding" -- when they enter a room, they are flanked by "residents", "assistants" and generally give off this air of superiority which is really just because of their route experience. The whole thing comes off more as a performance than anything else. Worse, they often get mad when you question them or ask them to explain themselves, or how they arrived at a conclusion.
Good luck finding work when an algorithm can do your job better than you. It's only a matter of time.