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Comment by bagacrap | Hacker News Reader

The usefulness of money is that it gives you more free time between now and death. And yes, tuition is a killer. So is lost earning potential as you go through school instead of working. As for creativity and mental exercise, I think law is way closer to engineering than medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than later. The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?

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>Law is way closer to engineering than medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than late

>The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?

"X is just a system! Why is this not automated?" is a common engineer mindset :) Unfortunately, X is just a system is only a good approximation if you don't actually understand much about what's going on. When you actually zoom in on the problem, the rough edges and hidden complexity start to become apparent, and your abstraction is no longer useful.

Computers are incredibly simple machines when compared to most messy real world systems, and we still have a heap of trouble dealing with them.

Healthcare has tons of potential to be improved by technology. There are regulatory and incumbent forces that will make it difficult and unfun to work on, but the general stance that automation can help reduce difficulty and human errors seems like a given to me.

I actually have hands on experience with EMR (epic) and I can tell you their convoluted solutions only make a complex system worse. As for actual clinical care, all the experience I have is second-hand, through friends and family in the field, but the ones I've talked to have admitted that most of med school is rote learning and bemoaned how easy it is to make mistakes.

I also have experience with something of an EMR, both from the implementation/standards side and the buying side. It is a complete and utter mess. The amount of cruft is insane, and service is very poor (nobody masters the subject, so you get the poor support). It is very tiresome.

>... medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than later. The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?

That made me laugh big-time even though I can't tell a python script from a boa constrictor.

Later rather than sooner would be much more accurate.

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