Kamal Ghorui
I was talking to a senior onco-surgeon, who must have operated on thousands of patients, to seek his advice on what should one look for in a surgeon for a complex case. As he was seventy-plus, he himself wasn’t keen to take up long and complex surgeries, so he suggested that I should look for a man in mid-forties who has access to next-gen machines, but has undergone gen-past training.
His logic was that such a surgeon will know the body physiology well enough and will have ability to recognise cancerous tissues that scans may have missed. He also admitted that modern robotic surgery tools do have an edge over the human hand in terms of precision. So having best of both the worlds was surely a wise decision.
This made sense, more so because we are still away from a complete shift when it comes to AI-enabled robotics; but, as I looked at his aging eyes and shacking hands when he poured tea in his cup, I realised something that we seem to be missing completely while rushing excitedly to meet AI and welcome it inside our homes and work places.
Around us, right now, are people like this geriatric onco-surgeon, who has acquired and refined skills, and once they are gone, these skills will be gone.
We are not realising that once the current generation of skilled humans is dead, we will face a void that we have no way to fill.
This surgeon has been inside thousands of bodies and has developed a very fine ability to dissect and differentiate tissues that is exclusive to him, and the only way he could have passed it on was to have someone working alongside him as an apprentice and learning the subtle art of surgery. Once he is gone without passing the legacy to another human being, in just one generation, the knowledge will be lost for humans, forever.
AI is surely going to be there to do diagnosis and surgery and from the looks of how it is shaping up, insurance companies and other forces of commerce that decide the fate and direction of human healthcare are going to be happy to pass the baton to AI based on hard data that will show its statistical superiority.
But, once that happens, what will be left in our hands?
It is not about surgery. It is about every skill that humans have developed over our million or more year long survival on this planet.
For abstract and abstractable knowledge, we have books that we can protect and keep them around to ensure that we can survive a technological Armageddon (such as solar flares hitting earth and destroying/damaging/corrupting everything magnetic), but when it comes to human skills, we have no repository in place, because we are not recognising its importance.
As we are developing strategies to imbibe and integrate AI into human life, we have come to a point where this issue needs serious consideration and is provided for in the vision of man-machine future that we seem to have no option but to head for.
We need some form of “reservation” for humans in every domain whereby continuity of human skillsets is protected consciously.
The AI enthusiasts may argue that humans must compete with AI and allow the better man/machine to win. As every human deserves access to better/cheaper services, superficial logic suggests that if machines offer a success rate of 97% in an Onco-surgery and humans are at 95%, the domain should be handed over to machines. But, if we allow that, what will be the collateral cost is vanishing of human skills?
It is easy to fall for the simp-logic of why have horse-carts when autonomous cars are here, but if we map this logic with what is at stake for entire species in the skill domain, it is possible to see the risk involved, especially when you consider the shortness of time at hand.
Humans don’t live for long and we probably have already lost a lot of skills as we have developed a wide range of technologies in last few hundred years. But this transition has been slower compared to the way AI is moving and hence we may not have time to make amends in this case.
Handing over is always a painful process, and hence for the young and the pragmatic, this may sound like a rant of an aging man who is suffering from nostalgia and wants to protect what he is comfortable with. But the risk is real and a solution needs to be in place before it is too late.
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