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The education of humans can be accomplished at a lower cost by simply realizing what some of the
progress in this area looks like, giving it a name and then applying the technique in an organized way.
We used to teach students the multiplication tables. When slide rules came into favor, they were at first
banned from use during examinations and then required to take technical examinations. The same
thing happened with calculators which were at first banned and then required. The use of automation in
education is therefore well established.
Another example of this type of education is implied by how the current farmer functions in the United
States. Look at how we educate a farmer so that she can plow 500 acres in a day. We teach her how
to sit in a fully automated machine with a Global Positioning System (GPS) guidance device and observe
how the machine does the plowing in a totally automatic way including taking samples of the soil and
noting where the location of each sample was using the information from the GPS. The analysis of each
sample of soil is used to select where fertilizer will automatically be applied later on.
I am using the term “automation” to describe the technique by which the farmer in the example above
was “educated.” The slogan that I am using to promote this method is “automation is education.”
Currently there are 43,000 deaths each year on US highways due to automobile accidents. Millions are
injured and the cost of these deaths and injuries are staggering not only in terms of dollars, but more
importantly in terms of human pain and suffering. The solution is to educate people to drive in a manner
that avoids the human errors that cause these accidents. I believe that the “automation is education”
approach will be used to solve this problem. Research has shown that the main problem is due to the
fact that humans are controlling the accelerator, the brakes and the steering wheel. This will be greatly
improved when automated cars and trucks permit humans to drive without actually touching any of these
controls. After this educational system is in place, accidents on the highway should plummet to less
than 10% of what they are now.
Currently there are more than 100,000 deaths each year due to errors by doctors and hospital
personnel.
In the past, electrocardiograms (EKG) were the electrical patterns of the patient that were recorded on
paper and then physically looked at by doctors who interpreted the disease by noting patterns in the
waveforms. Not only was this a waste of paper but it was a waste of time teaching each doctor how to
“read” an electrocardiogram. Each doctor would develop a bias toward her interpretation given her
personal experience with patients. This personal history might have been valuable but it was not
universally shared with other diagnosticians. Now, electrocardiograms have been totally automated and
doctors only have to read the computer’s diagnosis. By improving the automated equipment that does
the diagnosis to use neural networks, these devices may not only learn from their own experience but
also communicate with other machines to share what was learned. The autopsy of former patients can
be fed back into the machines that diagnosed the patient earlier so that they may learn from the
outcome. The autopsies will all be recorded in computer readable formats and the neural networks in
the diagnostic equipment will all be learning from the autopsy data.
The first step in solving additional problems with automation is to place a radio frequency identification
(RFID) chip under the skin of each patient just like we do to pet dogs and cattle. When the diagnostic
equipment takes the patients data, for example the EKG described above, the computer can make an
error free connection between the patient and the data which will avoid many of the simple misfiling
problems that currently occur. Similar devices will be used to connect an injection or a pill with a
particular patient’s RFID tag in order to avoid human error.
Compliance is a problem in both human driven automobiles and human patients. Many humans simply
don’t take their car to be serviced when the odometer tells them that it is time to change the oil. Newer
cars have diagnostic lights that tell the human driver when they are supposed to change the oil, but this
doesn’t mean that it gets done. With totally automated automobiles, the car will drive itself to the dealer
for the oil change when the owner is busy doing something else and owner compliance will no longer be
a problem.
Patient compliance is another problem. If a patient doubles up on their anti-depressant medications
when their sister gets cancer, then they will run out of medications before they can get their refills. This
will cause their minds to go quite wild but can be avoided using pill dispensing equipment that prevents
the patient from deviating from the prescription. Eventually automation equipment will be placed inside
the patient in order to keep all bodily chemistry in proper working order. At one point in the future,
SSRIs will be injected directly into the blood stream in response to depressing words coming from the
patient’s mouth. More advanced versions will use electrodes placed into the skull that will allow
monitoring of the patient’s thoughts. Stimulating electrodes will allow the “computer psychiatrist” to
modify brainwaves in a fashion to allow the patient to function normally.
Teachbot
Teachbot