[dagw]

Doctors can touch, feel, understand...

Sure they can, but many don't either because of lack of time, or quite frankly, because many doctors are bad at their job. And even in the best case scenario we will never be able to provide doctors to 100% of the population. For many people the choice won't be AI or a (free) caring, passionate doctor who has time to understand you and answer your questions, it's AI or nothing.

Same with teaching. A lot of people simply don't have access to teachers, and if even the ones that do, might not have teachers that have the time and knowledge to actually teach what they want to learn.

[krapp]

This is an argument in favor of more human doctors and teachers, not replacing doctors and teachers with software.

[dagw]

The richest countries in the world cannot even produce enough competent doctors and teachers to fill their current needs. A world that produces enough skilled human doctors to meet everyones needs is even more science fiction than a world with skilled AI doctors.

[tharne]

> The richest countries in the world cannot even produce enough competent doctors and teachers to fill their current needs.

They can easily produce enough doctors, they just don't. A couple of reasons for this: schools inflate the amount of education required so they they can make more money and doctors go along with it (and a crazy amount of licensing requirements) to prop wages up by keeping the supply of doctors artificially low.

You could be an ICU nurse with 20+ years of experiences. Want to make a jumpt to becoming a doctor? You have to start ALL the way from the beginning of med school as if you an 23 year-old humanities major who decided to go to med school. Your 2 decades of hands-on medical experience counts for exactly nothing in the eyes of medical schools and certification boards. Does anyone really believe this is a good way to run things?

[zimpenfish]

Speaking from one of the formerly rich countries (UK), we treat our doctors and teachers incredibly shabbily - long hours, low pay, terrible conditions. It's frankly a miracle that anyone over the last 15 years has gone into either profession.

Fix the low pay and terrible conditions and yeah, you'll easily produce enough doctors and teachers, but late-stage capitalism isn't going to do that...

[dagw]

Fix the low pay and terrible conditions and yeah

If the UK where to offer doctors the best pay and working conditions in the world, it could fix the UK doctor shortage, but only by 'stealing' doctors from other countries and making their situation even worse. To the best of my knowledge there aren't many empty slots at UK medical schools due to no one wanting to be doctors.

It's 'easy' for any one richer country to fix their problems simply by outspending and buying up resources from a 'poorer' country (in fact some people claim the UK's problems are due to other countries buying up all the UK doctors and nurses), but that doesn't solve the global problem

[zimpenfish]

> there aren't many empty slots at UK medical schools

Also underfunded and treated shabbily (like all the educational establishments in the UK.) I should have been clearer, I suppose, and said that just improving conditions for the existing doctors and teachers is a stopgap, what's actually needed is a burning out of the hideous policies of the last 12 years and a solid return to a more socialist approach to government.

[krapp]

The richest countries in the world choose not to produce enough competent doctors because of capitalist incentives, not because it's actually impossible.

[check89]

What do you mean?

[ben_w]

By itself it's an argument for both; the argument for "we can't have more doctors" is "we want some of those people to do other things besides doctoring".