[CipherThrowaway]

1. There is a meaningful difference between replacing and assisting. Replacing implies being able to take over the entire function. Technology that assists doctors with one part of their function, or process, can improve their output but is not capable of producing like-for-like output on its own. So the question of whether AI can replace or only assist doctors is very relevant to determining its impact on the role. Power tools didn't replace tradesmen, for example. If AI was able to replace doctors, then your clinic would be able to scale down to 0 rather than 10.

2. If a clinic can use an AI tool to make doctors 10% more productive, doctors become worth more rather than less. Firms are incentivized to hire more rather than less in this scenario. What you're invoking here is the "lump of labor" fallacy. There are market conditions where increasing efficiency really does reduce quantity demanded, but it's not clear that medicine really is one. As far as I can tell, far from there being a fixed lump of medical work, the general population in most of the West is under-serviced and struggles to get reliable, timely, cost-effective access to medical expertise.

[david-gpu]

Whether or not there is pent-up demand for healthcare, the emergence of AI clinical assistants, like any other form of efficiency increases, effectively expands the supply of healthcare services. In a free market, an increase of supply lowers the price at equilibrium. And as their salaries go lower, fewer people become interested in joining the profession.

We saw this play out in agriculture, in manufacturing, and now it is starting to happen in some services. I do not understand why would we think it will be any different this time around.

[lm555]

In theory, yes. But in practice, at least here in Eastern Europe, there is such a shortage of doctors that even if they became three times more productive, there wouldn't be any meaningful changes in demand. For example, I haven't had a personal doctor for the past five years because they don't have any free capacity. Last month, I called the doctor twice because my child was sick, and they told me I shouldn't call them so often. So I think we're a long way from that happening.

[CipherThrowaway]

>increase of supply lowers the price at equilibrium

The thing you're missing here is that "healthcare services" and "doctor's labor" aren't the same unit. Ceteris paribus, efficiency increases allow the price of healthcare to decrease while the price of doctor's labor increases. The thing that makes this non-contradictory is that a single doctor can now produce "more" healthcare. Economics says the opposite of what you think it does here. Increasing productivity drives expansion in market size, which drives up the ratio of value in the market to its labor inputs which drives up salaries.

Like I said, there might be important real-world reasons why these scenarios won't play out in medicine the way the theory predicts. But so far, you haven't provided any.

Manufacturing has also seen the opposite of what you are saying here. Global manufacturing production value has exploded over the last century, quite literally lifting billions of people out of abject poverty. In particular the last 3 decades of enormous per capita income increases in China have been driven by industrialization. I'm guessing you're taking a US-centric view that is exclusively focused on the local collapse of US manufacturing. This is to do with globalization and free trade, not improvements to labor efficiency.