This is fascinating and scary at the same time. I dread the future when people will have access to cheaper health insurance with the caveat that all consultations and procedures will be performed solely by AI. Want a human? Pay extra.
I imagine human consultation could be more expensive, at least in the US, due to liability of human error. Especially if/when AI capabilities in medical procedures becomes clearly superior.
I am looking forward to it! Right now we get doctors who are "qualified", but take you after 20 hour shift with no sleep, and do not even speak fluently in the same language as patient.
And this is on VERY expensive state helath insurance!!!
Why would you want a human? I don't see how anyone would pay more for worse care.
Bro the future is that AI will be optimized to a point where it is superior to humans when performing this surgery.
That is a different kind of scary. Because it’s justified. Why limit the ai when human lives are at stake?
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This is already happening though, to a point; recently, local GPs have been subsumed into larger health care provider companies, and they have set up systems so that before you can make an appointment, you need to go through a wizard and / or chat interface. Likewise, people are encouraged to go to a website and do some self-diagnosis before calling a doctor - things like "if you have a fever, how high is it and for how long have you had it?"
It's indirectly related to health insurance cost, as we have a GP shortage and they (I presume?) realized a lot of people are making appointments and wasting a GP's time for trivialties like a cough or cold.
I'm pretty sure they already have, or are experimenting with having people go through an AI chatbot first. This is already very much a thing with any kind of customer support. It's not a new development though, the preceding generation was conversational interfaces.