Opthamology being automated by Google
An article appeared yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing a new system for diagnosing Diabetic Retinopathy. Quoth Lily Peng, M.D., Ph.D. and Product Manger at Google:
our algorithm performs on par with the ophthalmologists, achieving both high sensitivity and specificity. [...] For example, on the validation set described in Figure 2, the algorithm has a F-score of 0.95, which is slightly better than the median. F-score of the 8 ophthalmologists we consulted (measured at 0.91).
This is only one condition, but the writing is clearly on the wall. At some point in the next 20 years, diagnostic medicine will become about 95% automated with only the occasional Dr. Gregory House needed to fill in the remaining small holes.
Make sure that anyone you know who is going into medicine does something physical (like actually examining patients) or they will have to go back to school again and take on more debt before the last lot is even paid off.
To get back to politics, this is yet another problem with the current DNC alliance between professional knowledge workers and the 1%: Any job that pays well and can be done in software will be automated.
Comments
Idiocracy... again.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXzJR7K0wK0]
Health care will soon be a McDonald's visit...
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
I don't think it's that bad
At least not for a while.
My particular hobby horse is that the Dems like to throw around "Get a degree!" the way some wingers used to say "Gat a job!" What I'm trying to document in these postings is that non-physical labor will be automated faster than physical labor. I expect that Doctors (not to mention medical techs) will still be around for a while because of the need for adaptation to particular circumstances.
Eventually, though, you are probably right, but the time between then and now is crucial to deciding whether what we get is Star Trek or Mickey Ds.
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
Google tried to scan every book in the world
to create a great world library (for a profit) but they were stopped by the courts. The scans were not always of new books, so they were flawed and they did not have the author's permission. Writers fought them on copyright grounds and that was the end of their dreams of A World Library.
Even Google has its limits.
To thine own self be true.
But medicine is a business
At least in this country. Competing with doctors using an automated service has no real legal barriers.
And who says it has to be Google that eventually runs the service - it could just as easily be IBM (the Watson team is working on similar technology) or Amazon's cloud services.
A fair amount of diagnostic Medicine is already outsourced to places like India over the Internet. All this would change is how the results are prepared and how much it costs.
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
It's not a business in Canada, it's a service
We pay a fee each month unless we are low income, then it's mostly free. Our medical records are all online and that works wonders.
Last time I saw my family doctor, he said "We just don't know." I agreed with him that medicine is an art rather than a science. Although it uses science as much as possible, it's still humans treating humans.
To thine own self be true.