Quote from: giantdragon on November 02, 2013, 12:46:58 AM

When the doctors who have spent 10-15 years on education/training expected to be replaced by Watson and even programmers (!) could be affected by advanced IDEs and frameworks...

Good! The rest of us are all now wayyyy better off (living instead of dead, for example!), since healthcare is automated. Sucks for them - in that unlikely scenario where they just get replaced all at once* - that they wasted 10-15 years learning something that wonderfully, thankfully, miraculously no longer needs doing. But it doesn't really suck for them, because the same thing is happening in almost every industry. Doctors also have to eat, have housing, clothes, massages, cars, leisure, etc. They may be out of a job (or more likely doing something much more efficient with their expertise), but the case where they are totally unable to use their expertise assumes radical advancement. You cannot posit so radical an advancement that many or all doctors face instant, total unemployment, and then turn around and claim that the other industries would just have stagnated.

No, if medical technology advances to Star Trek levels, then likely so do most other things. That means everything will be radically cheaper or even free, making it basically unnecessary for anyone to work, or to work very much. Doctors now make a lot of money, but they also have to spend a lot of money on the things they want. Automation fixes the latter, while not necessarily causing any problem for the former since they can often just switch jobs within the same field. They are freed up to do more important things that do need doing. Not always will they stay working, but very often; yet automation always brings down prices, and does so far more dramatically than the wage loss of any typical employment "downgrade."

You cannot on the one hand posit a situation where machines do everything for us to such an extent that hardly anyone (or no one) is even needed to oversee things, and on the other hand claim that people would be starving to death and not have good, incredibly cheap or free healthcare. If you had a bunch of machines that did EVERYTHING for you, including maintaining the machines, you wouldn't have a job, but you'd be living like a king, or a god. Not having to work is an unmitigated blessing, not a curse.

*Much more like they'd simply switch to more efficient work, like double-checking Watson and helping develop better ones. The fallacy here is that there is some limited number of things to achieve in healthcare that we are somewhere near finishing. No, there can always be better healthcare, and as the world grows more efficient - through automation! - we will be looking for more and more better things, like life extension, then radical life extension, etc. Doctors being totally replaced because medical expertise counts for nothing at all would take quite a long time, there would be early warning, and as mentioned above the rest of society would have advanced incredibly by this time so being out of a job by then would be no problem at all.

This is an age-old economic fallacy, and I'm really surprised to see it on a Bitcoin forum. Here's a more complete treatment if anyone has any illusions that this isn't a fallacy:

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-curse-of-machinery#axzz2jPA98VQc