Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipthetable | Hacker News Reader

Doctors aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Their jobs often go far beyond diagnosis.

For instance, in paediatrics one of the trickiest types of case to deal with are those relating to safeguarding. The tact required to navigate those situations, eg. correctly identify whether an unexplained bruise is a signal to flag a safeguarding issue or has a reasonable explanation, is not something that can be automated and would likely receive a lot of pushback.

It is worth noting that in 1930 Keynes predicted that the work week would shrink to 15 hours thanks to advances in automation.

I have great confidence in our abilities to create more work for each other.

View on HN

Yeah, my job is now automating tasks using AI and code instead of automating tasks with just code. The code part has gone down, and the abstraction has moved up a layer, but I have more work than ever.

The makes you an an observers orchestrator in a rudimentary agentic system. What happens when that layer of abstraction for scheduling, managing and instructing of agents is better suited for an LLM or group of LLMs? I think a lot of people are going to get screwed.

You can say the same thing about all abstractions. React? So you are just an orchestrator react code that will do the actual work. Etc.

You sound like you're having a bad day. Go take a walk, its just someones side project on HN.

Well, my recent visits to GP convinced me that unless you need a surgery or further checks such as X-Ray, MRI, blood tests, then you don’t really need a human.

These recent visits I saw junior doctors, one of them literally pulled Google to ask a question.

Any job that requires “memorising” things can be automated with generative AI.

Your junior doctor sucks. I visited a endocrinologist who did the same thing repeatedly during a routine visit. Uninspiring was an understatement.

The ability to iteratively observe and inquire to explore the state and the limits of the patient is NOT something automated docs will be able to do anytime soon. Diagnosis is a trivial task compared to learning who the patient is and how involved they actually will be in managing their own health.

Maybe not fully, but a typical non-emergency visit to a doctor in the U.S. basically involves them taking a glance and prescribing whatever the most common drug to treat the issue is. Then, if it doesn't work, they might send you somewhere else or see you again and actually think about it.

If you even see a doctor. More and more, physician assistants and nurse practitioners will be the first line of healthcare.

> shrink to 15 hours thanks to advances in automation

That effectively happened. Then we invented staff meetings & quality circles.

> I have great confidence in our abilities to create more work for each other.

This is because we have a lot of people who don't like the idea of having to go work while others sit around on their ass getting checks. I get it. It's the most natural thing in the world, but we've got to evolve past it and we've got to evolve past it right now. Not 50 years from now, not 10 years from now, right now.

A shitload of people are going to be out of jobs very soon. Sooner than anyone thinks, actually.

And there's really only two paths this goes. We institute Universal Basic Income and some kind of program or programs to help you learn a skill that doesn't lend itself to automation well... or... the wealthy continue to horde everything and half the population starves to death... which doesn't happen, because when people get hungry, they start to kill the wealthy. And frankly even with a swarm of murderdrones, good luck stopping 200,000,000 people from killing you.

Evolving towards Star Trek's Federation is the way to go, I just hope rich people aren't too damn stupid to do it.

Half the global population lives on less than $7 a day. I admire your optimism, but it's perfectly possible to keep large swathes of people living in abject poverty.

$7 a day is a step up from the olden days for those people. They're pleased with that.

$7 a day would be a step down for first-world (and second-world) economies. I think people would be very unhappy. Very very very unhappy.

The most likely outcome of AI displacing skilled labour unfortunately.

yeah doctors and lawyers are safe because of how their lobbies make them necessary as rubber stamps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com