Medicine is not really like the TV show ER, unless you work in the ER. Much of it is 9-5 and the stress comes from dealing with administrators and paperwork, the same as any office job.

My dad has been a doctor for over thirty years and the most stress he's had to deal with on a weekly basis is filling out paperwork.

My girlfriend is a doctor. She mainly works in the ER, but sometimes fills in at doctor's offices and the out of hours clinic. She finds them horribly dull, and basically hates them. Except they pay $100-$125 per hour. She likes that part.

Doesn't an M.D. imply more job security and a higher starting wage than any C.S. credential?

It also implies a significantly higher starting debt than C.S. graduates. Medical students take out huge student loans for undergrad and med school, and probably during residency as well because those salaries are really low (around $40K/yr).

Quite. Can't outsource a surgeon, can you? Not to mention the social prestige.

At the risk of getting quite off-topic, in my opinion most physicians will eventually be replaced by a combination of Bayesian diagnostic software and surgical robotics. There will be an intermediate period where physicians will control and oversee the software and robots, but this too will pass.

Those tasks which cannot be easily roboticized (for example, all the soft skills) will be shifted over to nurses.

It's a lot more complicated than that. Bayesian analysis alone is insufficient to produce accurate diagnoses, and even with more advanced clinical decision support tools you still need a human to carry out the observations. Physicians won't be generally replaced until we have strong AI (at which point everyone gets replaced).

It's sor tof happening (not the tech part). I dated a nurse practitioner for a while, and the medical industry is putting more and more responsibility into their hands to save money.

Good luck in getting the vague descriptions of symptoms that patients give into your diagnostic software. When you say this, do you think it will happen in our lifetimes?

Two words: medical tourism.

Which is due to too much domestic demand, raising prices too high. Medical tourism isn't costing surgical positions.