re: The 2016 Physician Compensation Report is out

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Physicians are being targeted from numerous positions - mid-levels that want increasing autonomy and will accept less money; heuristic AI systems that can diagnose far more quickly and efficiently than a physician, and can access 100% of all medical knowledge at all times, and can seamlessly implement new data into novel medical contexts; and the inevitably of a single payer system, which will mean that physicians will subsist monetarily on medicaid and medicare payments.

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You know doctors fix shite too right?

They can barely get a robot to open a door without falling over . They aren't taking out complex pancreatic or brain masses any time soon.

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The salaries will take an irrevocable nosedive in the near future before the position is ultimately diluted into more of a passive overseer of the clinic.

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I agree with you that the pace of technology is proceeding exponentially. AI is closer than most people realize because they think linearly, not exponentially (Kurzweil has written about this extensively).

I will make this point however. Most people, including this board associate heathcare with delivery of services/care rendered by a provider to the patient. It is easy to conclude that AI would do this better than a human. The main limitation to this thinking is that drivers of health and wellness are not service rendered by a provider, but mainly diet, movement, sleep, and stress management self directed by the patient. AI, like human providers, cannot fix that via medical services rendered...

Here is the vicious cycle we live in:

*note: this is describing how poor of a job we maintain health in the US. I would argue we treat disease /solve acute problems better than anyone (which is why people travel here for acute services). That distinction must be appreciated.

Typical person lives a life in total disregard for eating, sleeping and living. They motor along with the hope that the current healthcare model (acute interventions via procedures or chronic medications) will save them from decades of poor habits.

Typical person reaches breaking point and wonders why they have to take medications and why our technologically advanced services cannot "do better". They then overwhelm the medical infrastructure (leading to increasing access problems to provider when the irony is that they should have been looking to themselves to maintain their health) as providers continue to try to fix them within the current model (more meds, procedures). Just look around at that current failed experiment...

Said person tries to compare outcome data from US to other countries (who do a better job than us living as I defined it), and somehow concludes that the difference in these outcomes is due to the access and types of acute medical services delivery system (again neglecting or downplaying the contribution of lifestyle). This sentiment is rampant on this board. Hence, pseudo-academic discussion take place on how these systems have to change missing the whole point as rooting out the true problems becomes politically incovenient on multiple fronts.


It all starts with human to human interaction on practical ways to eat, sleep, and live properly. AI nor current public policy (many of the current policies in place are incomplete, impractical or wrong due to a myriad of issues. I have posted extensively on this using cholesterol as an example) can do that.

By the way, AI may have other options to solve the human healthcare problem (think Skynet...)