Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

Author:Martin Ford
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780465040674
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

* This raises the question of whether the liability would simply migrate to the manufacturer of the AI system. Since such systems might be used to diagnose tens or even hundreds of thousands of patients, the potential liability for errors could be daunting. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in the 2008 case Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., that medical device manufacturers are protected from some lawsuits if their products have been approved by the FDA. Perhaps similar reasoning would be extended to diagnostic systems. Another issue is that previous attempts to create “safe harbor” laws for doctors have been vigorously opposed by the trial lawyers, who have a great deal of political influence.

* Nurse practitioners with advanced degrees have been able to overcome such political opposition in seventeen US states and are likely to be an important component of primary care in the future.

* The names selected by Sankai seem a bit odd for a company focused primarily on elder care. HAL, of course, was the unfriendly computer that wouldn’t open the pod bay doors in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cyberdyne was the fictional corporation that built Skynet in the Terminator movies. Perhaps the company is eying other markets.

* Consider, for example, the Soviet Union, which by all accounts had some of the best scientists and engineers in the world. The Soviets were able to achieve solid results in military and space technology, but they were never able to scale the benefits of innovation across the civilian economy. The reason certainly has a lot to do with the absence of working markets.

* In the United States, the constitutional authority to create a single-payer system—regardless of whether it is run by the government or by private corporations—probably derives from the government’s ability to levy a tax on everyone to pay for the system. Therefore, all or a portion of the premiums would be paid by the government. This is already the case with the insurance subsidies associated with the Affordable Care Act. In other words, the federal government can force everyone to pay for a single-payer system through taxes, but it cannot prohibit a parallel private system. So there still would likely be additional services available to those willing and able to pay out of pocket, just as there are private schools. This is different from the system in Canada, where most private health care services are prohibited—leading some Canadians to seek health care services in the United States.

* Maryland has a special waiver that has been in place for over thirty years and allows it to pay higher Medicare rates. As of 2014, Maryland has moved to a new experimental system that is allowed under the Affordable Care Act. In addition to setting all-payer rates, the new program will enforce explicit caps on per capita hospital spending. The state expects to save $330 million in Medicare costs over a five-year period.

** The same fact sheet says that Medicaid (the program for the poor) paid 89 percent of actual hospital costs.

* A related issue has to do with the patents granted to drug manufacturers.

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