[grondilu]

Personally I'd compare it to meteorology. Meteorologists used to interpret images from satellites and I suppose they made predictions based on a bit of science, but also a lot of heuristics. Now (still a supposition, I'm just a layman about this) computers do most of the heavy work. Yet meteorologists still exist : their work consists in choosing the computer, operating it, understanding the output and other stuff like that. You can't just give a supercomputer to someone and expect him to predict the weather. It's still a job for an expert.

Medicine could become kind of like this.

[electromagnetic]

Extending the metaphor. A computer might not predict a perfect storm developing because the model isn't perfect. Without the human there to see it, you miss something disastrous.

A doctor would be the same thing. Sometimes things just don't follow the rules we expect them to. Medicine is full of instances where diseases cause obscure complications. I mean the series House MD is based on these, there wouldn't be a show without thousands of these instances.

I think taking human error out of mundane doctoring would be great, and allowing people to specialize into the more complex areas where creativity is as much a part of the diagnosis as anything else then I think we would greatly benefit.

What's sad is if you read many of the cases used in the show House, the patients IRL died. The condition was found in the autopsy, because the doctors just kept following routine.