Which specialties are the safest, and least safe, from the rise of the robots?

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efle

efle

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No, seriously. What specialties would be easiest to automate, and which the most difficult? Is automation really possible in our careers?

Sparked by this great little CGPGrey video which specifically mentions how doctors and lawyers may lose work to machines.

 
Robots can't replace any specialty anytime soon (even after becoming sentient and rational). They can replace the midlevels though (which doesn't require sentience for that to happen)
 
I'd guess psych, PM&R, public health/preventive medicine (at least from mechanical robots) and ob/gyn.

Yeah.
 
About neurosurgery :diebanana:
 
A better worry would be what jobs could be outsourced to off shore docs==> rads, path. Or not intellectually challenging enough where nurses can do 90% of the cases===> anes, family med
 
olivarynucleus said:
A better worry would be what jobs could be outsourced to off shore docs==> rads, path. Or not intellectually challenging enough where nurses can do 90% of the cases===> anes, family med
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Always did seem odd to me how much anes got paid
 
Id imagine primary care is least safe..
Punch in all your info into a computer and out pops the most indicated medication for your diabetes.
 
I know this thread is serious, but the title is like funniest thing in the world to me. "The Rise of the Robots." Yasssss.

Do you guys remember this?
 
allantois said:
I think pharmacists will be the first to go. I'd take a robot for the pharmacist at Costco who shuts down the pharmacy for an hour lunch near me.
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That does seem like a job that would benefit from a computer's instant access to all drug facts and interactions etc, without memory problems, no error rate...a good first candidate for sure
 
Anesthesiologists are already having their lunches eaten by nurse anesthetists. Its not that much farther to have a robot do anesthesia than a nurse with an extra certificate.
 
efle said:
I love that that's the benchmark. "Well guys, even the nurses can do it, it's about time we hand it to the robots"
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well yeah, basic anesthesia for procedures like colonoscopies are pretty much just hit em with a bit of versed compensate for body weight and tada. That's why they let nurses do it. Its pretty much just cookbook formulas.
 
efle said:
That does seem like a job that would benefit from a computer's instant access to all drug facts and interactions etc, without memory problems, no error rate...a good first candidate for sure
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This is more the role of a PCP to know these facts and interactions.. which makes pharmacists seem even more dispensable
 
allantois said:
I think pharmacists will be the first to go. I'd take a robot for the pharmacist at Costco who shuts down the pharmacy for an hour lunch near me.
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Yeah there are already plenty of automated pharmacies, places like Costco send refills there when they're overwhelmed. Keep in mind though, people of the general public still want someone to yell at when their copay went up a dollar

Plus old people always loved when I helped them pick out their foot powder when I was an intern. Companies won't give up the "druggists"
 
SSSMDt said:
This is more the role of a PCP to know these facts and interactions.. which makes pharmacists seem even more dispensable
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You would be very surprised. Plus, people see more than one doctor most of the time. Also, a lot of scripts, even escripts are written incorrectly.
 
Even though a specialty may not be necessarily safe there can be very robot-safe patches within the specialty.

For example, perhaps a robot could be built to automate the pathologists job in the near future but can the robot come up with hypotheses and test them? CGPgrey mentions some robots doing things like research but they certainly are not doing basic science. We have a super computer on campus that is doing like a kajillion different experiments, simulations and calculations every day but I would not call this robot a scientist.

However, one day we may be able to simulate consciousness in an automaton and have them look just like us (like in the sci fi novels and movies we grew up with). It's not far fetched. I'm very concerned about baristas/servers and drivers personally. The economy of the future is going to be pretty awesome and terrifying. I wonder what we'll do with all of the unemployed?

I think visual processing software could be made well enough today to do the drawing and radiation allocation that Radiation Oncologists do on a regular basis if a sufficiently effective treatment algorithm (like those employed by Watson) is included as well. RadOncs are very expensive so I would not be surprised if this is one of the first specialties to be downsized in some capacity. Same goes for Radiology.

I think heart and brain surgery are still quite safe although robots will most likely be playing larger roles in these fields in the years to come. Robots cannot perform these delicate tasks without humans on one end however; at least, not yet.

It's quite difficult to think of one that is totally safe...I think, in general, in the far future doctors will probably be re-relegated to the "diagnosis, prognosis, education" duty model that was enjoyed during Osler's period of "nihilistic" medicine. When that day comes the "nihilism" will not come from inability to treat as it did for Osler but will instead come from inability to treat any more effectively than a robot! We would basically become a human there to guide a patient through their treatment (basically a nurse) and then perform other, non-clinical duties in our greatly expanded free time.
 
One of my math professors who worked on developing an algorithm to analyze x-rays, assures me that robots are not going to take over surgery anytime soon.

If an AI can do surgery, then I assure you, so many other jobs have been lost in the process that almost everyone will be in the same boat as you. Even self-driving cars will be an issue, because so much of our economy is built around human controlled transportation.
 
Pretty sure emergency medicine could be better done as robots. Seriously, all those fools know how to do is pick up phones and call consults.
 
caffeinemia said:
Pretty sure emergency medicine could be better done as robots. Seriously, all those fools know how to do is pick up phones and call consults.
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shots_fired.jpg
 
One thing is that, if a computer can do it, it's almost always better if a computer does it.

Computers aren't forgetful, their rationality isn't affected by emotions or stress, and they don't do things like unfairly weigh evidences.

My father, who used to be a machinist, would tell me that the machines would notify the machinist about the tolerances of the metal and whether the part would break or not when you were making it. Skilled machinists would assume that their intuition and experience was better than the computer. They were often wrong.

It's the same with self-driving cars. It's likely that self-driving cars will be orders of magnitude safer in every way than a human driver. A robotic diagnostic program, a fully automated robotic surgeon, either of these would be able to out perform a human any day, as soon as they can be developed.

It's just something we can't escape.
 
My biggest interest in all of this is just because robots will inevitably be able to do all of this one day, does that mean we would want them too? I mean, even if they can give me a great diagnosis of my illness, I think it is easy to forget how important personal connection is in medicine. If the robot can not make feel comfortable and trust in it, then no matter how good it is I, as studies have shown, will be less likely to follow its instructions. Half of medicine is dealing with people and just because WATSON can put together certain diagnoses does not mean it would make a good doctor. I mean the point of interviews are to make sure a person can speak to others and is personable, so if robots can't do that, I think that physicians will still be employed.

It is very easy to think that just because a robot CAN make me a great beverage that I like at a bar for instance, it doesn't mean that I wouldn't prefer to have an attractive and personal bar tender do that as well. So, I think it is less about when robots will be capable of diagnosing disease or preforming surgery, and much more about when they can start to actually act and LOOK like humans that they will start to represent a much larger scale of the economy.
 
Edited:Basically what someone above had said x) I'd say radiology may be the least safe given the nature of the work.
 
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Naw, ya'll have it wrong. In a few decades we will all have prosthetic bodies where we just upload our personalities and BAM!!!!... we can be whomever we want to be!. Medicine as we know it will be obsolete and "doctors" will be nothing more than engineers that design these bodies and maintain the stability of the data of which a person's personality is encoded.



^ The above post has been inspired by Ghost in the Shell
 
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