This is a prediction, not a prophecy, but it’s one you can bet the farm on. I see humanity being pushed towards an international, robotized health care system in our lifetimes. Those are us who are my age, who manage to survive to old age, will likely be nursed and operated on by machines.
Is this a commentary on how removed and isolated from each other we are? Nobody to take care of our frail and elderly, so we need experts to build machines to do it for us? Sadly, most people are too busy working to see to their elderly, so they get “closeted” in a home.
My day job exposes me to the massive, mandated changes happening in the health care industry. Everything is going to computer. Chart rooms are giving way to server rooms, and doctors’ dictation is being replaced by reportable fields in a database. It is obvious to me that these databases will one day be centralized, and probably tied to the biometric IDs of the future. It’s a brave new world out there.
I know some of you are aware of the brain and body chip technology that is already out there. Some of the more innocent-seeming things they claim these chips can be used for is to monitor blood pressure, pulse, blood sugar, etc. When you have data in a database and a mechanism to get that information into the database (ie, a chip in the body), you can create a robot to work on that data set.
Does anybody think this is a good thing? A bad thing? If “good bedside manner” could be standardized and written into a program, would people prefer it to a human doctor? There are studies (which are a bit hard to swallow) with elderly people which have reported robotic dogs are just as effective and curbing loneliness as a real dog. If this were true (big if), this raises some fascinating points about human nature and human perceptions. Of course, I’m one of those weirdos who is rather comfortable with “lonely hours.”
Knowing about predictive programming (we’re prepared through fiction for the changes in society planned in our lifetimes), I’ve been looking at movies/books with sympathetic robot characters in a very different way now. Time to dust off my Asimov books.
Doctors are one profession that probably considered themselves safe, but the robotization of just about every job is something we will be seeing sooner rather than later. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? One unavoidable side-effect of this is massive centralization of power, and the removal of human conscience (such that it is) from the process of carrying out the decisions of the authority in question.
That’s the background information. Now, here are some articles worth reading.
THE PROBLEM
SOLUTION ON THE HORIZON