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The Harvard Medical School Commencement address of 2050 was given by Eve Turing, the first-ever nonhuman Harvard commencement speaker. The last class of human physicians, three in number, had graduated from Harvard in 2049. What events in the first half of the twenty-first century led to the demise of the human physician?
As often happens, the beginnings were innocuous and of interest to very few. Automated readings of electrocardiograms were considered a useful advance, eliminating the need for caliper measures of PR intervals or calculations of the cardiac axis. Other data-intensive tasks — reading CT, MRI, and PET scans — relied on human interpretation of digital data (it was still hard to find an insurance code to bill for m…