The Industries Of The Future By Alec Ross
This (link to library listing) is a fantastic book and I’d highly recommend listening to it. It’s well written and the insight is researched quite well. I borrowed it from my local library in an audio format.
What I took away from this book is how the future workforce will be affected by technology. Everyone from caretakers to healthcare professionals to wait staff at a restaurant perform tasks which can be automated.
This books does a nice job of explaining how the transformation will take place, what the barriers are and how it will affect society economically.
There is a lot of money being dumped into artificial intelligence and I’ve shared with my readers some of the consulting work which I’ve been involved in. It’s likely that less analytical tasks in the healthcare industry will be farmed out to computers.
Medicine has a massive shortage of workers. We need more caretakers, more RN’s, more MA’s, and we need more affiliate clinicians. It’s said that we are short physicians and pharmacists, as well. Germany, Japan, and China are solving their shortages by injecting technology.
It’s important to understand how much of the information that patients are sharing with us is now digitized. Their charts are massive amounts of data. They refill their medications online through mail order pharmacies and they collect their own vitals at home. Also, quite a few are using telemedicine as a cheaper, faster method of healthcare access.
True, in the near future no oversight group and not even consumers will trust a computer to do things right. However, what this will mean for certain healthcare workers is that they will work alongside a computer and will have fewer overtime hours and will likely need to have some computer training in order to succeed in the future of their profession.
A few decades ago, airplanes required multiple pilots performing difficult tasks to get from one airport to the next. Today’s autopilot technology is said to have the capability to completely replace pilots if it wasn’t for the consumer demand to have a human doing the flying. Will healthcare consumers demand the same or trust the lower-error computers?