I'm about to graduate from medical school in a few months. Once I get my medical degree, I'm going for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I've always wanted to do computer science since high school but I equally wanted to become a doctor. At one point I decided being a doctor was more important. I valued autonomy highly and I figured nothing is better than the freedom to operate my own small private practice in the future. I didn't want to end up being employed as a programmer and I expected that being a freelancer is no where near as stable in terms of job prospects as being a doctor, especially on the long run. Add to that the fact that I was fascinated by how the human body works for the same reasons I was fascinated with computers. I think any hacker-minded person would. I wanted to know the ins and outs of the human body. I wanted to know how it breaks, and how to fix it. Also, to be honest, I was very tempted with the extra income that comes with medical practice, but autonomy was ultimately the primary motive.
6 Years later, here I am, graduating with a decent GPA but having 0% interest in pursuing clinical practice, although i have performed very well clinically and in terms of my medical knowledge. I simply realized that the practice of medicine (specifically diagnostics and treatment decisions) is nothing but a classification problem. We are literally trained to memorize 'algorithms' (flow charts) for diagnosing and managing hundreds of different illnesses. That's about it really. It boils down to asking a standard set of questions (the patient's history), examining the patient, and trying to guess the diagnosis. Often, lab tests are needed (you order them based on the flow chart you memorized for the presenting symptoms). Once they're available, the diagnosis is usually clear, or further testing and imaging is required, and the cycle continues. Even for the complicated medical issues, this whole process can be represented by a simple flowchart that easily fits on an A4 sheet). The majority of modern day work done by doctors can (and will) be automated in the near future. The biggest hurdle was never the technology; it's the laws and regulations. I've seen papers published in the 80s where AI bested human doctors in diagnosing many diseases, and recently I've seen more impressive results in radiology and pathology diagnostics, where the diagnosis purely depends on vision, which is a very complicated problem when you try to solve it with computers. The results are very promising and some papers have shown results where human pathologists and radiologists were outperformed by computer vision.
Humans are obviously still needed to deal with patients. It takes some clinical skill to know how to extract information from patients, how to examine them, and how to look for clues, but that does not strictly require a doctor to be done properly. In fact, most of our medical training, even in residency, is concerned with learning more and more 'algorithms', guidelines, and staying up to date with the latest medical evidence.
Computers won't replace doctors in surgical specialties, but they certainly will replace primary care physicians, as well as doctors in other fields like internal medicine (including its subspecialties like cardiology, Pulmonology, etc), emergency medicine, oncology, and others. These fields purely depend on memorizing and recalling flow charts of diagnosis and management. Humans are fallible when it comes to memory and recall, computers are much much less fallible in these cases, and virtually infallible in some cases (100% diagnostic sensitivity and specificity was reported in some studies, which is impossible to achieve by humans)
By the time I realized what I mentioned above, I was already close to finishing med school. I decided to graduate first then see what I wanted to do next. I no longer saw any inherent joy or value in being a doctor. There is no room for trying to be creative, smart, or efficient. You just have to follow the official guidelines and policies, and hope you don't get sued when you, inevitably, make a mistake. I see no meaning in a career like that.
I love coding and I love learning CS in my free time so my decision for what to do next was easy. There are some interesting studies utilizing AI for diagnosing cancer metastasis on CT scans using computer vision, and that's an example of a topic I might be interested in. I don't necessarily want to do medically related research all the time though. All I want to do is to be a software engineer working on very interesting projects. Even the most mundane coding projects are easily 10x more mentally stimulating than clinical work in my opinion.
In retrospect, I have no regrets. I know a lot about how my body works and I leanred a lot from dealing with hundreds of patients over the years. I also learned a lot about who I am and what I really want, and to me, this knowledge is invaluable. I also realized how much I appreciated computer science.
I guess that's enough rambling. Apologies for the late and long reply. I hope you found it useful, and I wish you the best of luck in your future career ;)
I've read this blog post multiple times over the past few months and I wish I knew about it before I went to college. His career advice has so much clarity that I can't find elsewhere (so far).
Thanks for sharing the link. I'm about to do a career switch and reading this again is certainly reassuring. He is right. We are what we do for a living.
I find his work very inspirational and I hope I'll be able to personally thank him one day for all the work he has done.
True. We have reached this level because of our complacency, and not due to Apple inherently trying to be malicious towards people like OP. The vendors are responsible to have sensible defaults, but we can't buy their products, use their software, sign up for their services, and then complain about malice when the vendors are delivering exactly what we signed up for and agreed upon. I'm just trying to say that OP should focus his energy on being more self conscious about what he signs up for rather than claiming that Apple is stealing his data. He gave up ownership of the data the moment he agreed to the TOS. What Apple is doing is counterproductive and just illogical from a UX point of view (in my opinion) but they did not steal OP's data. The title is a bit clickbait-y in that sense.
I sympathize with OP and I generally really hate Apple's direction when it comes to software and user experience ever since OS X Lion.
However, OP shouldn't claim that Apple 'stole' his music files. He signed up for a paid service and he should have checked how the service will affect his computer. We as users are responsible to know what software we're running on our machines and what it does to our data. I understand that a standard TOS agreement is ridiculously long and impractical to read, and I guess that's how we are trained to be lazy about protecting the integrity of our systems and our data, but that does not give OP the right to blame Apple for delivering exactly what they promised. I hate Apple but I don't think that it is intellectually honest to claim Apple stole OP's music.
As a long time HN lurker, I created this account just to directly thank you for the amazing work you've put into the first issue. I loved it so much and I'm going to recommend it to all my friends who read sci-fi.
I loved the fact that you are so reachable via HN and e-mail, and I loved the positive discussions about the first issue on HN. The blog and the 'behind the scenes' posts are a really great idea. I sincerely hope the magazine grows and becomes self sustaining. Quick question: if I subscribed to the magazine by e-mail, would I automatically receive notifications of new blog posts, or do I manually have to check your blog from time to time? I searched for a subscribe button for the blog but couldn't find any. Thanks a lot!
EDIT: I forgot to mention that I absolutely love the podcast idea! Can't wait for the next issue!