From rcinet.ca
Dr. Brian Hodges has a stern warning for future healthcare providers: learn to be caring and compassionate or be replaced by robots in white coats.
Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, deep learning and big data will in the near future make many tasks performed by physicians and nurses obsolete, Hodges told hundreds of healthcare professionals who packed his keynote presentation at the World Health Summit in Montreal on Tuesday.
The only thing robots and artificial intelligence systems cannot replace is human caring and compassion, Hodges said.
“I hope we find a human head and a human heart inside the white coat. An empty white coat would be a tragedy,” said Hodges, professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto. “Without compassion, without human compassion there is no healthcare.”
Dr. Brian Hodges says advances in artificial intelligence and robotics technology can soon see many tasks performed by doctors and nurses being taken over by robots and deep learning systems.
Dr. Brian Hodges says advances in artificial intelligence and robotics technology can soon see many tasks performed by doctors and nurses being taken over by robots and deep learning systems. © Lino Cipresso
In his presentation titled “Health Professionals in the 21st Century: What Will We Need Humans For?” Hodges argued that every profession has a competence framework.
“If you boil down all competence frameworks, you arrive at what Aristotle gave us more than 2,000 years ago, which is the domains of knowledge, technical skills and what he called the practical wisdom or phronesis that helps us integrate knowledge and skills,” Hodges told his mesmerized audience.
Two of the components of this competence framework in medicine – knowledge and skills – are already being radically transformed by advances in technology.
“It’s only by hanging on to the third domain that we will be in the future,” Hodges said.
The digitization of humans, cloud based information and the emergence of deep learning or artificial intelligence are already transforming the area of human knowledge, he said.
“How many of you are wearing a Fitbit or something like it,” he asked the audience referring to the popular health and exercise tracking wearable gadget. “So you’ve chosen to send your digital fingerprint to a corporation and this is part of what healthcare is facing today, where we take many, all human qualities and characteristics and translate them into digital form, which are held in cloud-based sources.”
This omnipresence of data will allow health authorities to redistribute healthcare in the communities at a distance via tele-health, bringing an end to big hospitals, he said.
“In our hospital in Toronto we foresee very soon being able to monitor patients with congestive heart failure with a smart scale at home so we know when they begin to gain weight from water retention so that they can be sent digitally information or to their healthcare provider in the community to change their care so they don’t need to come to the emergency department,” Hodges said.
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