The End of Human Doctors – Understanding Automation

Last week we discussed how doctors perform medicine, and what parts of the process are worth automating. It turns out that deep learning is a very good match for some of the most time consuming (and therefore costly) parts of medicine: the perceptual tasks. We also saw that many decisions simply fall out of the perceptual process; once you have identified what you are seeing or hearing, there is no more "thinking" work to do. In fact, the answers these systems arrive at can be superhuman. "In situations where the only information required to make the decision is in the signal itself, machine learning wins by a small margin." It turns out that quite a large subset of medical tasks are like this, which we will explore in more detail today. To begin with we should recognise that automating a subset of medical tasks is not the same as automating all of medicine.