re: How much longer before Doctors are obsolete?

I agree with you bob except there is one problem. How do really know the full extent of progress in the medical field? The gnome has been mapped for like over 20 years...we all know how classified weapons research is. I would be willing to bet there is medical and gene therapy research just as highly or more classified. Thats the unknown quantity here.

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This may seem bizarre, but when Nanobots are perfected, they will expand our lifespans by hundreds if not thousands of years. It's going to be exciting.

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This makes me happy. So many more years of jerking off to look forward to!

I agree with you that the field isn't going away, but I disagree with this reasoning...

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We are going to replace a field where we still probably know less than we know, but doctors will be replaced before bankers and other number punchers.

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It's kind of the entire point of machine learning that the machines will be able to figure out stuff that we haven't. They use massive pools of data to identify every little trend, pattern, and outlier and reverse engineer solutions to problems that we don't even know exist yet.

AI innovations won't just come in fields where we have a nearly completely established base of knowledge and procedures. It'll be far more valuable in fields like medicine where there is still so much we don't know.

Though if I had to guess, I think AI will be most valuable medically in coming up with the solutions to our ailments. I still think people will want an actual doctor to explain it to them and walk them through it, at least for the big stuff. Almost a midpoint between today's nurse and medical doctor

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing considering the competency of a couple of the nurses I know haha.

But it is a step towards eventually merging those two professions, which is where I think things are heading

If AI came along and you program it to "keep people healthy" here is a potential outcome:

AI would conclude that the biggest drivers of poor human health relate to obesity and poor habits like smoking, nutrient poor diet, chronic stress in many forms (including) using peripherals..

It may decide to cut off your hands, induce blindness, wire your jaw shut, provide controlled feeds via G-tube to offset the issues above.

A very blunt solution to the problem, but not very practical...

We will continue to become unhealthier as a species as we continue to move further and further away from the natural environment/behaviors we evolved in /with

We are out of balance/mismatched, plain and simple...

LINK

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We live in extraordinary times. Human ingenuity has given us flight, space travel, lasers, the internet, and amazing medical technologies that can help the deaf hear and the blind see. We’re able to reattach limbs, transplant organs, and we’re even not far away from being able to grow new human tissue in a lab.
Yet despite these considerable advances, we’re sicker and fatter than ever before.

Consider the following:
• Excess weight now accounts for one in three deaths among middle aged people in the US each year.
• A billion people around the world suffer from diabetes and obesity.
• 600 thousand people die of heart attacks in the US each year.
• One-third of Americans suffer from high blood pressure, which contributes to almost 800 thousand strokes every year.
• 50 million people in the US—one in six Americans—suffer from autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and Crohn’s disease.
• Depression is now the leading cause of disability, affecting more than 120 million people worldwide.

Unfortunately, there’s every indication that things are going to get worse before they get better. This is the first generation of American children that are expected to live shorter lifespans than their parents. If current trends continue, 95 percent of Americans are expected to be overweight or obese within two decades, and one in three will suffer from diabetes.

The consequences of this modern disease epidemic are profound. In addition to making us miserable, it has brought our economy to its knees. In the US, the cost of treating diabetes alone is estimated at $250 billion a year. To put this in perspective, the U.N. has estimated that the cost of ending world hunger would be $200 billion—less than we spend treating a completely preventable disease each year.

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It takes 12 years for the average drug to make it from the research lab to the patient. Yet, according to the people arguing on this board using a combination of conspiracy theory and the word "stuff", we will be seeing doctors unemployed in our lifetimes. Not likely.

People think linearly, but technology evolves exponentially. Don't discount the likelihood of our world being unrecognizable in 30-50 years

I'm going to finish up The Master Algorithm by Domingos this week and then I'm on to Bostrom's Superintelligence next. I've heard great things about it

And yea, near everything on wait but why is outstanding, the writing machine post was awesome

Just wanted to make sure we're being precise when we say AI has the ability to enforce unfavorable conditions on us. Certain types of AI may eventually be able to do that, and potentially to a catastrophic degree. But there is a lot of elementary AI that we can control and utilize. Just want to make sure people don't clump all of those into the same bin

one thing you guys are forgetting is profiling. Robots would not question people's symptoms, prescription pain pills or drugs like adderall would be a huge problem.

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Will AI and machines be able to fully treat us in 50 years?

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AI

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If this happens, there will be no such thing as disease/illness because we will either be extinct or immortal.