"… the Observer fretted that doctors in general practice might be in the first tranche of jobs obsoleted by AI, since people prefer to ask Grok about their unsightly groin rashes. “As technology advances,” the Observer gloomily noted, “it’s evolving to replace medical professionals across every field.”
It’s really bad news for people who borrowed hundreds of thousands to finance a medical degree. “As AI progresses in an unregulated market, primary care physicians will likely be replaced first,” a doctor quoted for the story predicted. …"
Full disclosure – my earnest hope had been that lawyers & bureaucrats would be the first professions to be advised to “learn to code” as a consequence of AI. After all, they only deal with words, which is the forte of Large Language Models. Doctors deal with actual physical human beings – or at least they used to, before the aforesaid lawyers & bureaucrats buried them in red tape.
This is not so far fetched as it may seem, at least when it comes to diagnosis. Way back when I was in med school, the NEJM (New England journal of medicine = WOG (word of God), had an article which purported to show that, when it came to physical examination, agreement of experts was random! That diagnosis was determined almost entirely by history, rather than examination.
Findings on physical examination were those expected by what was determined from the history. Thus, history of the problem or illness is critical. Paging Dr. Grok.
Now, “robotic surgery” may not be quite accomplished, Any robotic surgery which I have seen has always relied entirely upon human surgeons guiding the refined, steady and fine-controlled movement of robotic tools. It is not remotely like self-driving cars.
Well, you’re getting your wish @Gavin. I can’t believe the legal drafts AI can produce, in minutes. And ANYBODY could ask it a question. My personal fave of my articles is “Precedent in the Age of the Information Banquet”, about the effect of the Internet Age on hierarchical legal precedent within jurisdictions, stare decisis, now that everybody has access to legal decisions from everywhere.
The main unique knowledge lawyers had, it seems to me, was how to do legal research, where to look to find information. And now, everybody has access to a machine that can do it.
As to primary care doctors, I’m too emotionally involved with that issue to see it clearly.
The way things are now under “capitalized medicine”, they don’t get to spend much time with a patient, nor do they get to form a long-term relationship with any patients.
IF , if, everybody could consult a family doctor who practiced like my father did, like my BMD did, I don’t think they’d be stupid enough to give it up— or rather, to give it up AGAIN, like when they let themselves become convinced that those practitioners, working 10 hrs/day excluding phone time, plus pretty much 24/7/365 availability, were just out to make a quick buck.
You might be giving the right advice for the wrong reason. With the advent of AI, we actually need less coders—like a lot less—not more. In the not-too-distant future, all that’ll be needed are a few ultra-productive, ultra-high-IQ “coders” to train and monitor the various AIs—these people will become known in our society as “priests”. If you’re just another run-of-the-mill programmer, your days are numbered—you’re already obsolete. So, in conclusion, if by “lean to code” you really mean “go &#@% yourself”, then your advice is spot on!
Just last week the lawyer I work with sent me a “statute” which appeared to contradict a memo I had written. Of course I was mortified— until I looked up the citation Chat provided. The section contains no such language.
How can people even be considering “consulting” Chat about a medical problem?
Poor old lawyers! A few years back, the scuttlebut was that Big Law firms were outsourcing much of their junior legal work to low-cost firms in India. Now they may be insourcing that legal work to AI. I would like to feel sympathetic to those now unemployed (and student debt burdened) lawyers … but nothing happens when I press the “Sympathy” button.
Looking down the road, if companies save money by knocking out the bottom rungs of the legal career ladder, what is going to happen when the over-paid old lawyers at the top of the ladder go to whatever just reward they have earned? Over a period of a couple of decades, might the legal profession self-terminate? Still nothing when I hit that “Sympathy” button.
It will self-terminate. Just like sadly, medicine is doing. It’s now not PC to think that a “nurse practitioner” is not on the same level with an MD. (although if what I read about medical schools lately is true, there will be nothing to choose between them).
My BMD says doctors did this to themselves: they wanted to be able to hire these “paramedicals” and charge for their services. But like a virus created in a lab, the plague escaped. It always does.
I think as lawyers, the main thing we knew which lay people didn’t was where to look for answers. How to do legal research. But now, the info is available to anybody online. You do not have to scale the edifice of the forbidding gold embossed spines of the law library shelves. I wrote an article about this, “Precedent in the Age of the Information Banquet”.
But now, this is complicated by the Chat factor. And it’s not a bug, it’s a feature of Chat, which everybody should know by now: just like when “chatting” with another person, the interlocutor says what it thinks the other wants to hear. The faux statutory language I reviewed last week sounded very good, perfectly authentic. If I hadn’t had access to the Westlaw database (which can’t hallucinate) how would I have known it wasn’t real?
I reckon Aaron Burr’s words were prophetic when he said, “The law is whatever may be boldly asserted and plausibly maintained”. That was a cynical statement at the time, when long as case and statutory law was still memorialized in codices. Now, it’s simply an increasingly pertinent observation.
This is part of the premise of a Sci-Fi series I recently completed, where a true AI self-developed in Earth’s networks, helped society advance rapidly for a couple generations (including spreading out into the solar system), then disappearing suddenly. Society mostly collapses.
I found this series in my search for Sci-Fi material that is thematically clean enough to share with my precocious pre-teen grandson, FWIW. I think this one will be considered a classic before too long. Doesn’t hurt that he’s independent.
CIVIL WARS ☙ Friday, June 27, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 
