> I never thought doctors would be hit so soon by the automation/AI crisis
I think most people in AI are more surprised that it took this long. The tech has been there for decades for a pretty large percentage of routine diagnostics, especially carefully defined clinical-sample type diagnostics. People were pretty sure in the '80s that it'd all be automated soon, but it never managed to make it into actual hospitals so funding dried up. Mixture of bureaucracy, legal issues, patients not liking the idea of computer diagnosis, doctors not liking the idea of computer diagnosis, incentives, etc.
I think changes in all those "environmental" factors are likely to be the biggest boost to something like this getting deployed in practice. Tech advances are good as well, and will expand the range of diagnostics that can be automated, but there is already enough low-hanging fruit in medicine that is easy enough for any of a half-dozen AI techniques to do it, that I don't think tech is actually the bottleneck.
I think most people in AI are more surprised that it took this long. The tech has been there for decades for a pretty large percentage of routine diagnostics, especially carefully defined clinical-sample type diagnostics. People were pretty sure in the '80s that it'd all be automated soon, but it never managed to make it into actual hospitals so funding dried up. Mixture of bureaucracy, legal issues, patients not liking the idea of computer diagnosis, doctors not liking the idea of computer diagnosis, incentives, etc.
I think changes in all those "environmental" factors are likely to be the biggest boost to something like this getting deployed in practice. Tech advances are good as well, and will expand the range of diagnostics that can be automated, but there is already enough low-hanging fruit in medicine that is easy enough for any of a half-dozen AI techniques to do it, that I don't think tech is actually the bottleneck.