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<title><![CDATA[Comments for entry "Robot Doctors to the Rescue" at Dilbert.com Blog]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/874]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Regular thoughts and updates from Dilbert.com]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from webgrunt]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1965901]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The day robots that are intelligent enough to do most of the jobs people do will be a second chapter in human history.  

What I mean is that no single event preceding this one will have had more impact on humans, and I'm counting the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, farming and the industrial revolution.  This is because most people, since our earliest known history, have had to spend most of their time working to survive and get ahead.  

Once intelligent robots exist, the need for human labor will be practically eliminated.  People will for the first time be freed from having to spend most of their waking hours at work or work-related activities (commuting, getting ready for work, etc.)  Want something?  Have a robot build it for you.  Can't afford a robot?  Rent one and have it build you your own.

I hope I live long enough to see this.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[FriPMCSTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Ardent_Eccentric]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1965138]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Not so sure of robots... A few years back I had a muscle spasm on my lower back. It was so painful I couldn't walk. I toughed it out for 3 days before I decided to see a doctor. After getting to the hospital, I was placed in a small room to wait for a physician assistant to look at my back. I waited 20 minutes or so, While still in the same amount of pain I was in the day before. While I was laying on my back on the table, I heard the door open. I look up, and see this gorgeous PA walk in. I then get up trying not look too much like a wuss and told her what had  happened.  She then has me do some movements to make sure it wasn't a herniated disk , and then pulls my shirt up and pokes my back a little. At the moment after poking me,  my back all the sudden felt better... It was so strange... But I think having her touch me helped relax the muscle that was spazing  out... 

I don't think a robot could do that.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from nasch]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964875]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[[ liability insurance is no longer needed as you just tell the victim of the errors that will happen to sue the robot manufacturer instead.]

So the liability cost is built into the cost of the robot.  Escaping liability cost is not that simple.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from XX_EE]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964832]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[i'm still keeping my doctor, but if my house robot can do everything you say, emit a huggable frequency of IR, and have a huggable physical form, i'm in.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from jwenting]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964791]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[&quot;1 How does this train of thought comply with the fact that the explosion of healthcare cost is for a great deal due to new technology being used? (Think mri-scan)&quot;
A large part of that rising cost is staffing cost, and liability insurance. With robots performing the procedures, staff cost gets less (1 service mech with a highschool education and some on the job training can replace a dozen doctors) and liability insurance is no longer needed as you just tell the victim of the errors that will happen to sue the robot manufacturer instead.

&quot;lthough I agree that people will be going to the doctor less as computer programs are developed to help assess easily diagnosed ailments. &quot;

Books have existed to do just that for decades, and now websites. All it does is give more fuel to hypochondriacs, give them more diseases to self-diagnose (I know, my aunt was one, until she died of a real condition everyone ignored because they didn't believe her until she literally dropped dead on the kitchen floor).

&quot; use the Internet to determine a diagnosis and treatment strategy, just as a human doctor does. &quot;

A qualified doctor has a lot of knowledge gained from years of training and practical experience, he's not going to browse wikipedia for random diseases until he finds one that matches the open symptoms a patient shows, like a machine would do.

&quot;True. When unemployment gets up above 25-30% the national debt will not be as big a concern. &quot;

It already isn't, if the government is to be believed. And maybe they're right, given that whatever is done to reduce it it won't matter and only influence the rate of growth of the debt.

&quot;My only quibble is that I'm not convinced we will need robot surgeons.&quot;

For run of the mill procedures like cataract surgery, those were experimented with in the USSR and other communist countries decades ago, with some success.
Of course if you don't care if the patient actually gets cured as a result of the procedure, you don't really care if the procedure takes differences between individual patients into account rather than just going through the motions like the machine it is.


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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Dilbro]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964622]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[When something like the sea urchin spines happens to me, my first reaction is to scream like a little girl and cry.

Your friends first reaction was &quot;wow, I gotta get a picture of this!&quot;

I can't see myself ever allowing a robot to work on me, especially if the OS is from Microsoft.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from marcoklaue]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964620]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Thirty years ago, robot surgeons were already expected to come within a decade of then.  Today, we have robots that can fold towels.  You say thirty years from now robots will be performing surgeries, I say in thirty years they might be parking attendants.  Although I agree that people will be going to the doctor less as computer programs are developed to help assess easily diagnosed ailments.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from dbkennedy1]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964584]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Today's Wall Street Journal had an opinion article along the same theme.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from pand0ra]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964537]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The robot surgeon is already here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from pand0ra]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964536]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[All robots are, are a computer in a metal tin can that can move around. As I work in computer security, if I have physical access to a computer it can be subverted with little effort. If someone is dumb enough to make a claim that the robot is &quot;hack-proof&quot; that will be a call to challenge. And someone will hack it and it will probably be done in a day or so. Then those that hacked the software will post it on the Internet for everyone to enjoy. They will then come up with a way to upload your own custom software to make the robot do things that it was not intended by the manufacturer.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from nasch]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964467]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[[ When it finds a Martian microbe it simply sequences the alien DNA and sends the data to earth for reconstruction.]

Off topic, but why would we expect Martian life to have DNA?  All life on earth has it, but if life arose independently on Mars, it seems more likely it would evolve its own mechanism for the roles of DNA.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Raskolnikov]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964465]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Tricorder (as in Star Trek) X-Prize:
www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org

This has nothing to do with the above X-Prize, but I read an interesting idea of how a robotic spacecraft could find life on Mars and send it back to Earth:  When it finds a Martian microbe it simply sequences the alien DNA and sends the data to earth for reconstruction.

So your future household doctor robot could do the same thing if it finds a new flu virus or a new antibiotic-resistance bacterium in your body.  It could send the DNA sequence to the Center for Disease Control and they'd use their mainframe AI tools to come up with a solution, which would be sent back.  

Your robot (and other doctor robots that belong to people you've had recent contact with) would &quot;print&quot; the solution and administer it ASAP.  This &quot;nipping contagion in the bud&quot; would be a new paradigm in flu control.  No mass inoculations would be necessary.

]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from DilgalLives]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964464]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[There has been evidence for a number of years that dogs can detect certain types of cancers by smell alone, so I think it only makes sense that machines be developed to recognize the smell of cancer. In addition to everyone having a thermometer in their home, some day we'll all have a cancer sniffer that we use on our family monthly.
My company already makes scent testing devices used at airports to check for explosives and drugs. I expect travelers would find being wanded less offensive if they knew they were also getting a free cancer screening.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from tbailen]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964463]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Yuck. This is not a future I would want to inhabit. The vision is taking the mechanization of human health to the extreme. I like health to be founded upon care: self-care and the care of  knowledgeable professionals. Please see the beautiful video &quot;A Doctor's Touch&quot; on TED.com.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Kingdinosaur]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964462]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[I can see the robot doctors being a good idea, at least to some degree.  

Robot chefs?  Not so much.  Unless the stuff they make tastes great, I don't think people will use them that much.  The only way most people will think things taste great is with too much sugar, salt, and fats/oils.  They'd be good for restaurants and fast food joints though.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from BobNL]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964459]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Two thoughts:

1 How does this train of thought comply with the fact that the explosion of healthcare cost is for a great deal due to new technology being used? (Think mri-scan)

2 This might very well work. All that is necessary for this is that the people of various automation en medical technology firms and some government institutions work together in a coordinated way and come to workable compromises in an acceptable timeframe. (I am parafrasing here, but that's from one of your books or comics where you are weaseling your way out of the responsibility for a project).]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from ponga]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964457]]></link>
<description><![CDATA['Incredible pattern recognition' is exactly the area where biological systems still trump software hands-down. Even for a well defined problem space like OCR, the error rate of dedicated systems still fall far short of most literate humans. Pattern recognition in a diagnostic context is essentially open-ended: you need to know what questions to ask. While software is amazing at recalling huge numbers of facts, the judgment of when to prune the search tree, and when to dig deeper is still hard to automate. Granted, statistical methods have advanced by leaps and bounds: but meatware still is quite a bit more accurate for most tasks. 

That is not to say that medical device technology including robots won't play a huge role in the 21st century. But our ability to automate pattern recognition is on the 'con' side, not the 'pro'.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from rbgos]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964422]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[I have one quibble with this concept - Research.

Robot Doctors can be programmed to carry out any of the routine tasks currently carried out by everyday GPs, surgeons etc.  But I don't think they'll ever have the imagination required to carry out research into new remedies or treatments on their own - they can help in the testing, but they won't come up with novel ideas.

And without humans going through the stage of learning and performing everyday medecine, where are the medical researchers of 50 years hence going to come from?]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from anothermick]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964402]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[being a technological modernist must be a neat feeling.  nonetheless, i'm not buying.  i don't deny the possibility or even probability that this sort of technology could come into existence in the near term given the right set of !$%*!$%*!$%*!$  i deny the possibility that the incredibly complex infrastructure required for all of this to develop will develop/continue in a stable enough way for this kind of technology to actually come into existence.  last i checked, the world was still run by people who don't really like or trust each other, and they don't seem to be doing a very good job of generating stability.  i predict that every step along the path from here to adorable-robot-printing-me-an-asperin-as-i-land-my-hover-car-on-my-roof-because-my-car-told-it-my-hands-were-warm  will be obstructed by a multiplicity of human forces more powerful than the forces that want to make that adorable robot a reality.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from RavenBlack]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1964299]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[MisterBeef said &quot;What about health care costs FOR the robots? More robots sharing more information equals more viruses. Man-made viruses will account for only a tiny fraction of robot infection. If billions of years of evolution hasn't rendered us immune to illness I see no reason robots will fare any better. (During the first few centuries they will certainly be more disease ridden than man.)&quot;

Not only viruses, but maintenance! We can't even make a hard drive last more than 5 years on average, and that's basically just a spinning thing, very little relative complexity. Artificial joints in humans don't last half as long as the original hardware, even when it's made of titanium, because rubbing parts wear out; original human parts wear out too but they also repair themselves.

So the only way we could get reliable robots is if they had some sort of self-replicating nanobots maintaining them. And the funny thing then is, they begin to become awfully human-like in their needs. When a nanobot's programming mutates and it starts killing the repair nanobots to make copies of itself, ouch, robot cancer! Then the robots will have to make meta-robot doctors to perform surgery on themselves.

Meat robots -&gt; robots -&gt; meta robots.]]></description>
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