Robots as Physicians
Job descriptions have evolved in character and number over the years. A Computer was a job at
one point in time. Computers were men who sat in a room with a pencil and paper performing the
job of calculating. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing were jobs that they performed.
Years ago, people purchased fat books containing logarithms base ten of numbers so that they
could perform the duties of the job ‘calculator.’ If you read introduction to such books you will
find that it contains the names of the people who originally calculated these numbers and wrote
them down. These people were called computers. There is a detailed description of the history of
each mistake in the original text and the human computer that found the mistake and corrected it.
It goes without saying that most jobs were manual labor at one point in time. Carrying water,
plowing fields, tending to domesticated animals and cleaning house are just a few of these jobs.
Long gone and mostly forgotten is the age in which humans were computers even though we still
tend our gardens, few of us look up logarithms in tables.
The well-paying available jobs have been due to either labor unions restricting certain jobs via a
cartel or have been ones that use education and intelligence such as high paying CEO positions.
Managers, engineers, physicians and lawyers have traditionally been well paying jobs in
America.
Let us take the job of physician as an example of a job that is traditionally performed by a human.
The human does a better job of interacting with a human patient. (Bedside manner.)
The human must memorize a lot of facts and names of parts of the human body. (They say typically
a doctor must memorize 100,000 facts.)
The human physician that can do the above is not usually also good at logic.
Kahneman and Tversky showed that most Harvard Medical School graduates could not correctly
answer a question having to do with the chances of someone having an illness given a certain rate
of false positive results by the medical testing equipment. If I ask an biomedical engineer, I get the
correct answer and if I answer a doctor, the answer is usually incorrect.
The human physician is not typically very good at cleaning her hands. The nurses typically do a
better job. The doctors feel that they are “too important” to have to perform such menial tasks. This
conflict of “I must clean my hands” and “I am important and shouldn’t have to do menial jobs”
means that sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.
Perhaps medicine needs to use more robots. Robots certainly have superior memories to humans
both because they learn faster and also because they have better memory retention. The medical
testing equipment should print out both the diagnosis and the probability that the patient actually
has the disease given the prevalence in the community and the rate of false positives. Improved
pattern recognition of X-rays should be possible using modern robots.
Since most medical care doesn’t require much invention or conceptualization, it may well be the
next area to computerize. Another reason to computerize it is that medical care is such a large
part of our expenses. Robots are usually less expensive than human labor.
Next
Job descriptions have evolved in character and number over the years. A Computer was a job at
one point in time. Computers were men who sat in a room with a pencil and paper performing the
job of calculating. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing were jobs that they performed.
Years ago, people purchased fat books containing logarithms base ten of numbers so that they
could perform the duties of the job ‘calculator.’ If you read introduction to such books you will
find that it contains the names of the people who originally calculated these numbers and wrote
them down. These people were called computers. There is a detailed description of the history of
each mistake in the original text and the human computer that found the mistake and corrected it.
It goes without saying that most jobs were manual labor at one point in time. Carrying water,
plowing fields, tending to domesticated animals and cleaning house are just a few of these jobs.
Long gone and mostly forgotten is the age in which humans were computers even though we still
tend our gardens, few of us look up logarithms in tables.
The well-paying available jobs have been due to either labor unions restricting certain jobs via a
cartel or have been ones that use education and intelligence such as high paying CEO positions.
Managers, engineers, physicians and lawyers have traditionally been well paying jobs in
America.
Let us take the job of physician as an example of a job that is traditionally performed by a human.
The human does a better job of interacting with a human patient. (Bedside manner.)
The human must memorize a lot of facts and names of parts of the human body. (They say typically
a doctor must memorize 100,000 facts.)
The human physician that can do the above is not usually also good at logic.
Kahneman and Tversky showed that most Harvard Medical School graduates could not correctly
answer a question having to do with the chances of someone having an illness given a certain rate
of false positive results by the medical testing equipment. If I ask an biomedical engineer, I get the
correct answer and if I answer a doctor, the answer is usually incorrect.
The human physician is not typically very good at cleaning her hands. The nurses typically do a
better job. The doctors feel that they are “too important” to have to perform such menial tasks. This
conflict of “I must clean my hands” and “I am important and shouldn’t have to do menial jobs”
means that sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.
Perhaps medicine needs to use more robots. Robots certainly have superior memories to humans
both because they learn faster and also because they have better memory retention. The medical
testing equipment should print out both the diagnosis and the probability that the patient actually
has the disease given the prevalence in the community and the rate of false positives. Improved
pattern recognition of X-rays should be possible using modern robots.
Since most medical care doesn’t require much invention or conceptualization, it may well be the
next area to computerize. Another reason to computerize it is that medical care is such a large
part of our expenses. Robots are usually less expensive than human labor.
Next
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