Here's why one tech investor thinks some doctors will be 'obsolete' in five years

Vinod Khosla once proclaimed that machines will replace 80 percent of doctors, which prompted waves of backlash from the medical community. Never one to shy away from controversy, the venture capitalist went a step further when I interviewed him last month for a podcast hosted by Silicon Valley biotechnology startup Color Genomics. "The role of the radiologist will be obsolete in five years," he said. In Khosla's view, sophisticated algorithms are better than specialists at spotting potential problems in medical images, like x-rays and CT scans. "There's no reason a human should be doing it," he says, adding that computers can rapidly shift through thousands of scans to evaluate possible diagnoses and potential treatments, as well as ingest the latest medical research.