Quote: (04-11-2019 04:26 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:
Quote: (04-10-2019 06:42 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:
... god knows medical doctors have completely failed at their profession.
I'm biased in favor of results. When I see a profession that is making more money year by year while their results are getting worse year by year, I have very little sympathy.
Sign me up for RoboDoc.
That's a really interesting point. As large scale diagnostics become more accepted it's going to be really hard for the medical guilds to keep pushing their nonsense. The amount of tweaks and "corrections" they would have to make would begin to become extremely difficult.
"Where 2+ hours of sunlight per day = better cure for depression than mood-regulator drugs, CANCEL RESULT."
"Where drug-18443 is found to be ineffective, CANCEL RESULT."
At some point the amount of butchery it would take to "govern" a nation-spanning health result database would damn the people governing it.
Just want to point one thing out first: I don't find most MDs to be all that sharp. There was some talk earlier about doctors have high IQ and most likely being able to be retrained to do something else.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
I've had tons of pre-med students in the freshman physics classes I used to teach and these kids were absolutely awful at it. It's an opinion I've seen a lot of physics professors share.
And yes I know most pre-meds don't end up in medical school - even the people I know who did get into med school were terrible at it.
And I'm talking super simple shit like:
F=ma
v=at
x=at^2/2
If you're having a hard time applying these very simple Newtonian motion equations, you're going to have a super hard time trying to do the logic needed to program.
MDs in general don't have the quantative skills to learn how to code. They should be terrified of automation.
With that said, my impression of the tech field historically is that they've always tried to work with the medical Care system. Often they attempted to simplify things, for example the numerous, and mostly failed, attempts at a unified medical chart system.
With machine learning, AI and automation, tech companies can now effectively replace the entire system. They'll still need a CEO or two like Bezos who is deeply cunning to pull it off. But it's very much do-able.
I'm not a strategist or anything of the sort, but I can definitely see some type of divide and conquer play, pitting the different medical system groups against each other. Some examples:
* Collaborate with insurance companies to do cancer screening/radiology/etc screening with your tech company instead of what the current medical industry offers. Lower cost for the consumer and the insurance companies. Also push Medicare to do the same
* Set up primary care facilities that combine AI/Robodoc with nurses/PAs. Especially in areas that lack medical doctors this could be feasible. And it would start off small, but over time you expand services. And if the quality of care and cost are better than traditional hospitals, ...
There's plenty of examples of small timers growing and cannibalizing an entire industry, often taking the higher end producers by surprise. If the AMA wants to play it smart, they need to give not a single fucking inch to automation. The entire "AI will never replace doctors, they're only tools for doctors" mantra will end up destroying them.
Many engineers, like myself, have interacted a lot with medical doctors when they were in college with me. And those engineers, like myself, have zero to very little respect for authority and especially medical authority. A lot of them really don't give a fuck about decorum and playing nice. If there is a young Jeff Bezos of medicine automation out there, he would absolutely crush the entire industry without a second thought.
As such, although I understand that the AMA is a powerful guild and lobby, I would not put money on them winning this in the long run.
People really don't fool around when it comes to their health - at least when it's time to go the doctor - when they realize these computers give them better results than human doctors...yeah it's game over. It might take a while, but again there's plenty of people who don't care about the authority of docs, they only care about results and those people will drive the changes needed.