AI
Misplaced Fears: AI and High-Skilled Jobs
Technological progress has always impacted low-skilled labour more than high-skilled labour. AI is no different
Hypochondriacs may wish to stop reading — doctors often forget things, sometimes don’t know them to begin with, and have to look them up. It’s a simple consequence of scale.
Medicine, as all complex fields do, has outgrown the human brain’s capacity. No matter how well you train doctors or how diligent they are, it just isn’t possible to cram a comprehensive knowledge base into an individual mind. Consequently, cognitive outsourcing to external media has to happen — reference books in times gone by, websites for the last several years and, perhaps soon, AI.
Bafflingly, this cognitive outsourcing seems to have invited the question of whether human doctors are needed at all. At least, I assume that’s the question on developers’ minds when they show me all manner of “doctorless” health technologies. You may even have seen some yourself, like those diagnostic tools on websites that let you type in your symptoms and then diagnose you with seventeen possible illnesses.
The problem with these doctorless technologies is that they assume ostensibly simple tasks — like referencing a patient’s…
