The healthcare industry is facing a number of challenges today. Between a very real labor shortage, and the need to keep everything clean, the industry is facing an uphill battle if it doesn't find some help. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Conor McGinn, CEO, Akara Robotics, to address this very topic and he has an interesting solution. Here is a hint: it's a robot. "We see a lot of opportunity in the healthcare system, largely due to the fact that there is this chronic labor shortage and without technology we just don't have a chance to solve," McGinn explains.

All that must sound really apocalyptic, but I'd still like to believe that machines won't completely destroy humans in terms of earning a livelihood. We have had this controversy before every major change. During the Industrial Revolution, manual laborers feared that steam machines were going to take away their opportunity to earn a day's bread. And they did, for the time being, but in the long run, things got much better for society in general. There is a reason why, in all this time, even with the rapid advancement of technology, nothing has truly replaced humans or made them secondary in the world's hierarchy.

"Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend as well as he." This peculiar thought--that, in the most important respects, and despite their manifest differences, all men are equal--has laid the intellectual foundation for democracy's unlikely triumph. But will society retain its belief in equality when it is no longer just man against man? Can democracy thrive when more and more benefits accrue to machines that are stronger in body, and quicker in mind, than any mere mortal? And will the machines' owners remain willing to honor the claims of their social inferiors when they no longer need them to make their food, or to staff their companies, or to fight their wars?