Not really. A programmatic decision tree will actually try out all the steps rather than glancing over the ones it thinks are not relevant. It also would not forget to test branches.

If all a doctor is doing is following a flow chart, you can be damn sure that a machine programmed with the same flow chart would do it more effectively.

If there was always (or, let's be honest, ever) time and resources to test every branch, then that would be a fair comparison.

It’s not fair to the doctor, but it’s better for the patient.

A robot doesn't have more resources, but it effectively has unlimited time to consider every branch.

The patient they're diagnosing, however, might not.

I wrote "consider" because that doesn't need to involve the patient.

But also the patient usually has plenty of time to answer additional questions. You can cover a ton of ground in less than an hour.

“I’ve considered all the options for three months. You have a rare cancer that will kill you in… uh oh.”

Patient doesn’t have to be sitting in the exam room to run out of time.

What I meant is that the computer can do three months of considering in less than five minutes real time. That's the benefit of tossing raw processing power at things.

That’s the point. Time and parallelization is cheap for machines.

I can see a short term future where “doctors” are replaced with non-doctor medical personal who gather data. Blood draws, temperature checks, collecting stool samples, photographing lesions, these are all easier with two hands. Analyzing the data will be done for the masses by machine.

And of course because of how the USA healthcare system works, it will somehow manage to be evens more expensive.

GP mentioned flowcharts in the pedagogy of medicine which is an easily verifiable statement. Anyone willing to page through Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine will be able to identify the decision tree figures. They are depicted on a pale green field.

Not the first in the tome, but pg 240[2] contains a great example of such a decision tree.

1. https://archive.org/details/harrisons-principles-of-internal...

2. https://archive.org/details/harrisons-principles-of-internal...

> If all a doctor is doing is following a flow chart

I don't think humans do that in the same way as code would. And why would they? That's exactly how they're more valuable!