All being said and done with respect to AI in medicine, Doctors and medical professionals will be the very last people to be replaced. Care (both physical and mental) will be the last bastion of humanity disrupted by AI.
Medical practice is very knowledge intensive, especially general practice. Very prone to human error, have you seen the stats on accidental deaths in hospitals? Excellent high-value use for (future) learning systems which can ingest and apply a large body of knowledge and reason in the face of a huge poorly understood graph of causal factors.
No, the last people to be replaced will be those doing unpaid labour, such as parenting, household chores, unpaid elder care: there's the least economic incentive to do so. So I do agree in large part with your final sentence.
I choose my GP based on my ability to trust and empathize with him, not because of his grades in medical school.
Medicine is an intrinsically human activity. It may be augmented and improved by AI, but people are still going to want human medics around, it’s just the nature of being sick.
I agree the direct interface to a lot of medicine needs to be a human as we need human assurance when we are sick and scared. Bed side manner can’t be replace to devalued. But we suffer from critical shortages of medical workers, many of whom can be augmented powerfully with knowledge machines.
My understanding is the real barrier is providers themselves find the user interfaces counter intuitive, aren’t afforded time to train on new systems, and are under so much pressure to produce with such a limited staff they can’t spend the time and energy to work these tools into their workflows. Add on to that the regulatory hurdles to innovation, general risk aversion in the development field, complexities of selling unproven tech into unsophisticated hospital network administration, etc, it’s no wonder it’s a slow slog. It’ll take someone like Kaiser really committing material capital, time, resources, and mandating adoption with a significant training program to see any success.
Empathy isn't going to help diagnose.
That's a matter of personal preference. I prefer self-service checkout in the grocery store even if there's an unused staffed checkout. Generally, I prefer robots and AIs wherever they are available.
Regulatory arbitrage.
You'd think Pilot would be the last type of 'vehicle driver' that would be automated. On the contrary, they were the first to adopt almost 100% self-driving.
> mental
We are finding curious things like 'playing tetris is the most effective way to avoid trauma'. Doctors will help in lab and diagnostic work, but the inference of what solution to administer might actually come from an AI. Ofc, similar to flight, the most challenging situations will still be 'manned' (like fighter jets or non-routine surgery)
Healthcare is inaccessible and understaffed in most parts of the world. If AI doctors can be better than the bottom-10-percentile doctor coming out of a US med-school, then they should be adopted wholesale.
So far WebMD with its entire algorithm being if(symptom) return "cancer"; has somewhat destroyed all public faith in these sorts of systems, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to get done to a useful degree.