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Notes -
I kinda agree with that, but I feel like we're largely already there. I have never used the services of a psychological therapist specifically, but over all my interactions with medical doctors for the last decade or so, I've never seen anything that looked like genuine people interaction and couldn't be replaced by a sufficiently sophisticated database lookup. "You have these symptoms? Try doing this and this. Didn't work? Well, try doing that and that instead." I see no reason that a robot, after ingesting the sum of all medical knowledge available now, wouldn't be able to do exactly the same. Surely, I'd like to have more - I would like somebody to pay attention to me, as an individual. But with the current system, where the doctor only has maybe 30 minutes per patient, and dozens of patients per day, and I don't have nearly enough money to pay for anything more than that anyway, and the insurance would probably wouldn't pay for anything that goes out of the prescribed mold in any case, there's no chance for things going any other way. The question is not "whether it can be done", but only "when the robots would be advanced enough to take over this". There's a lot of added value people could bring into the system over robots, but currently it is set up in a way that there's almost zero chance for any random patient, like me, to actually benefit from this value. It just wouldn't scale, and I am too poor to afford non-scalable solutions.
And I don't think I can practically expect this system to be changed - I am alive and in generally good health, so the current approach works, at least for me - and looking like I didn't see any mobs with pitchforks and torches anywhere near my local hospital, it generally works for most people too, and I don't see any way or resource for it to change. Genuine people interaction is already a luxury in medicine, customer service, and many other areas. It will become more and more so. If you are a millionaire - hire a private service which would guarantee you access to that. If you aren't - well, our extremely well trained robots will take care of 99.9999% of your real needs. And if you're not satisfied, you can chat with our new automated customer service assistant, we've got very good reviews for it.
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