Can We At Least Bring Back The Mini-Skirts?
Anyone old enough to remember the classic 1976 sci-fi movie “Logan’s Run” will remember the really cool plastic surgeon’s clinic, where you could pic your new face in a comfy video chair, they strap you on to a robotic table, a few laser zaps, a couple whisps of smoke, and Voila’! The clinic was completely sterile and modern with lots of cool lights and mood music, the doctor got to wear a lounge-wear silver tunic, his assistant was Farrah Freakin’ Fawcett, and he never, ever had to deal with Medicare. Is that where medicine is headed?
Automation is hitting everything, as Nvidia is glad to tell us. Every heard of “super-low latency conversational reactions.” Nah, me neither, and I have no idea what that means, but the chip giant tells us this is the output of its Hippocratic AI company, to serve patients with virtual “empathetic health care agents.” Previously I always thought it would be easy work to be one of those ubiquitous tele-health nurses. Based on what I see in the ER, the universal, immediate response to every tele-health nurse question is, “You should go to the ER.”
“Hippocratic says its Constellation model outperformed real nurses 79% to 63% in identifying a medication’s impact on lab values; 88% to 45% in identifying condition-specific disallowed over-the-counter medications; 96% to 93% in correctly comparing a lab value to a reference range; and 81% to 57% in detecting toxic dosages of over-the-counter drugs.” Those percentages don’t sound that impressive, so maybe they were using the phone nurses as the baseline.
“The generative AI-powered bots also cost a fraction of the hourly rate for nurses.
Hippocratic’s website shows its agents cost $9 an hour to operate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly pay for nurses was $39.05 as of 2022.” Don’t act like that surprises you. Big Insurance has to be licking its chops.
Is the “Logan’s Run” doctor now really a passe’ prop? An essay worth your time on americanthinker.com talks about the “Geicofying” of medicine. The author makes a persuasive case for advancing medical technology translating into more and more of health care being performed by the “scholastically inferior.”
AI, AR, remote robotic surgeries and algorithms for the algorithms lead to the author’s conclusion:
“These technological advances will usher in the Era of the Stupid Physician, just as DEI brings us the woke, brain-dead med student. And by delegating away their skills, physicians brought this on themselves. Add in technology, and it’s only a matter of time before the touchdown is scored and Team Doctors loses.”
It’s all pretty sobering. And if supply chains choke and standard hypertension, diabetes, and antibiotic medications are unprocurable, then what? What if the trucks don’t deliver pre-packaged normal saline and nice new, sterile IV caths. What if the electric grid is so spotty the CT scanners don’t work reliably, nor does the interweb to send the images to the radiologist or whatever AI genie replaces her?
But hey, I should quite encouraging Chicken Little. Insurance companies have a decades-long track record of valuing trained professionals and paying us appropriately for our talents and work. And it’s not like we make all of our meds overseas in China (who loves us), or that our electric grid is anything less than 100% reliable and redundant. Automation has already made fast food better, and I know it will make health care the paradise we all deserve.
