Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots

I don't have any source to backup my arguments and claims, but for many older medical practitioners, including my family (we have been a medical practitioner for several generations), we feel that the younger doctors lack of confident and knee knowledge because they rely on machines. I have a hard time to put my family's words into English because they are Chinese (they are Western medicine practitioner btw), but the basic idea is that they learn to use their fingers and their sensory inputs to gather empirical information about the patients. I won't say they can diagnose a tumor at a precise location or detect the type of cancer precisely, but experts can diagnose to a very good estimate. Back then they didn't have x-ray in every hospital. Only the major one has x-ray in China and my grandma and my father had to use their fingers to determine the location of the tumor, or the type of tumor. When my dad first saw the x-ray machine back in the 70s when he was still in China, it was amazing to him what he could do with him, but he said practical experiences and hands-on experience matter.

Ask how many new practitioners can do that with confident? I supposed few. Because most of them rely on machines.

What if machine is down? What if the machine is not capable of telling the truth? It has limitation.

I am arguing that machines can't help, but doctors should never rely on machine. They need to rely on their experience and knowledge and this is what distinguish an expert from an average practitioner.

To be honest, getting people x-ray all the time is largely because of suing medical mistreatment and then good part of just being efficient (or lazy if you want to be harsh). Hospitals are scared of getting sued so they'd put everyone through an x-ray machine.

I see a big parallel here with education: I am related to teachers and of course they will swear up and down that hand-crafted, personalized lesson plans are key, and teacher-student interaction invalidates the need entirely for automation. I'd imagine in the long run 80% of these "only humans can do it" tasks will be shown to be performed better by expert systems and data-driven algorithms.

Of course the catch is that nobody wants to be told that a large part of the skills they've developed over a lifetime have been made obsolete or relatively worthless through some code and electrons. Software engineers, and many engineering fields in general are used to the idea that every 5 or 10 years most practical knowledge is obsolete, that computers are relentlessly automating things done manually just a few years previous, and to not fight it but embrace it and try to leverage it. I don't think this is a common mentality for most professions. Even physicians for the most part, unless they work in an academic institution, let their reading fall by the wayside and develop habits and ritual around what they were doing when they finished residency.

They are doing more, but won't always feel the need to show their working for minor illness. That doctor will probably have gone through a few checklists in their head, deciding whether this could be a serious illness, and clearly came to the conclusion it was not. Presumably they also asked you a few questions about the location and nature of the pain?

Also, doctors do use computers already, when they're not sure on symptoms, need to look things up, etc. They have the equivalent of expert systems at their fingertips for when that is necessary, but most of the time it won't be.

I find it extremely hard to believe that even the best doctors could come close to touching the accuracy of an expert system.

Accuracy is not what is required, given our extremely poor and fuzzy knowledge of the human body, diagnosis and treatment is more like a tradeoff between different possibilities based on partial symptoms (not all symptoms will be obvious or noticed by the patient), tests which are not always accurate and sometimes harmful, and treatments which are not always effective and have some bad side effects.

An expert system would help with none of the above.

"Programmers need to be replaced by computers...no more buggy code!"

"Lawyers need to be replaced by computers--no more sleazy ambulance chaser ads!"

"Money needs to grow on trees! No more financial problems!"

Firstly, before anyone builds an AI that can look after people, maybe they can fix the software for looking at Xrays WHICH ALWAYS STOPS WORKING IN THE MIDDLE OF A BUSY CLINIC.

Secondly, I challenge someone here to put a number on how much it would cost to produce an AI that can operate robustly in a clinical environment. This includes the costs of developing such a thing, deploying it as well as testing it. Testing it would arguably be one of the most difficult and complex software testing problems ever. Now whatever that number may be, I hazard to guess that it's a lot. So what you are proposing is to spend a lot of money, so that we can practice medicine... slightly better... MAYBE slightly better.

The greatest improvements in healthcare come from the development of novel therapeutic technologies (antibiotics, vaccines, anaesthesia) or public health measures that change behaviour (sanitation, seat belts, quit smoking campaigns etc).

All of this frankly makes me sceptical of the wisdom of spending zillions on building medical AI, even if such a thing were possible.