AI and Futuristic Medicine: 1980’s Predictions Became Today’s Life-Saving Breakthroughs
But I’m still not in favor of AI-generated intellectual properties
BACK TO THE FUTURE or whatever
Most of you know I’ve been around for quite a minute. Yesterday, I unearthed this essay I wrote for an advanced writing class at Harper College in Illinois. It won a couple of awards and was published in the school’s annual. At the time, I was interested in forecasting how robotics would impact our world. Little did I know that a thing called LLM (large language models) would create chaos for creators.
I didn’t edit this to update any of my perspectives, though I added notations of current medical realities in parentheses. Consider the original story a time capsule.
Okay, Big Brother, watch this (Title and original text from my original early 1980s essay)
Robert Oppenheimer said, “Our problem is not only to face the somber and grim elements of the future but to keep them from obscuring it.” Certainly, we have all read fiction about robots running amok, marauding through the streets of Tokyo, murdering innocent humans, and taking over our planet so that green, slimy aliens can turn humanity into a never-ending source of sustenance.
Approaching the age of robotics with concern and trepidation wouldn’t be unreasonable, but refusing to explore the benefits of android technology and other future projections would be embarrassing even to a very timid ostrich.
Go forward in your mind’s eye and see the turn of the next century. On the first day of her life, a silky soft infant makes baby noises with her lips as she waves her arms and legs randomly. She is not yet ready to understand or even see her world; still, the medical people have seen her — right through to her final birthday.
That may be the picture if researchers like Isaac Asimov are correct. He forecasts technology allowing doctors to scan a human being at birth, harvesting an awe-inspiring amount of detail about her life story before it unfolds. (**Now that science has mapped the human genome and identified almost every protein around, this is not an unusual concept. I recently had genetic testing to eliminate a fear of two different diseases. I'm not an infant, but the info erased strong anxiety.)
Interested in knowing more about what might be around the corner, I explored the writings of experts to find that our health care is predicted to be computer-driven in the next millennium and will be improved by high-tech procedures.
Weird science
The technology exists for genetic analysis that can, at birth, forecast baldness, sensitivity to diseases (cancer, heart, lung ailments), body type, and hereditary life expectancy. Machines we use to scan and collect data will be termed “primitive” by twenty-first-century science. We have our alphabet soup of diagnostic tools: CAT scan, computerized axial tomography, used to analyze cross-section views of organs and tissues; NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, reading signals from human atoms as they move; PET scan, positron emission, detecting abnormalities by responding to molecular particles; and BEAM (brain electrical activity mapping) allowing doctors to follow brain signals in order to detect strokes, epilepsy, and maybe even dyslexia (**BEAM has been around since the early 80s; I imagine it has advanced since then....) They are actually only the parent technology of futuristic science-fact equipment that, using microchips, lasers, and computers, will make an infant’s life an open book from her first day through her last. (**Note that several famous doctors are working with ultrasound now to non-invasively reverse alcohol and drug addiction and help PTSD.)
As has happened in the past with television and other consumer electronics, these tools will become smaller, more reliable, more sensitive, and less expensive as researchers develop, refine, and perfect them. By the turn of our century, man’s medical repertoire, once consisting merely of crude tools wrapped in animal skins, will allow a patient to be passed painlessly through a chrome and steel machine capable of seeking out even the tiniest abnormality within the body.
According to Arthur C. Clarke, “Though superscanners will ferret out malfunctions in a four-color flash, eliminating tedious and painful exams, the emphasis will be on preventative processes.”
Clarke and Isaac Asimov both predict an age of home diagnostics and care. You will be able to purchase, perform, and accurately read home tests for early recognition of infections (bladder, ear, throat), diabetes, venereal diseases, or viruses. The safe, painless, and total reliability of these tests will save time and money, providing complete privacy of results that you can report, by electronic mail, to your physician (**email did not exist when I wrote this). For conditions that can’t be self-treated, you’ll have to visit your nearest medical mall.
Medical mall?
What in the future world is a medical mall? Our cities and towns, according to futurists, may be dotted with medical facilities like shopping centers. These one-stop facilities, perhaps constructed of chrome and glass domes, may offer a relaxing environment filled with towering plants, and the plash of designer fountains nestled among ceramic woodland creatures (**I was at one last week…).
Want to quit smoking? Quit drugs? Quit being controlled by food? Walk in, drop in, plug in. A computer at the behavior modification shop spits out a program created just for your personal needs. Hungry? Stop at the nourishment center to choose food for nutrition or food for recreation.
Expectant mothers can get earlier care at the prenatal center without waiting for an appointment. Infertility will be banished by genetic medicine. Moms can be fitted with tiny fetal monitors to track baby’s heartbeat or discover the sex, hair, and eye color of their unborn baby. Harmless birth control will be available without prescription. Drugs, synthesized from body chemistry, will alleviate pain or morning sickness without side effects or any possibility of addiction (**Well, the biologics are here, but alas, the side effects are, too).
Wholistic medicine becomes the rule for general practice, including pediatrics, where children might find a miniature train to ride through various stations with attendants dispensing inoculations that don’t hurt or being manned by a friendly robot taking vital signs. (**Stay tuned…it isn’t out of the question in the next 10 years!)
Can you picture yourself stopping by the mental health boutique on your lunch break? Chat with a psychiatrist about the stress of dealing with your boss that morning. How about taking advantage of group therapy sessions? Arthur Clarke suggests, in the book already cited, “Health is a balance of mind and body and can best be achieved in an environment carefully attuned to both.” This miraculous mall, beckoning you to drop in, plug in, or walk through to attain your health balance, may well be government-sponsored. The concept will allow hospitals to maintain fewer beds, smaller staffs, more highly intensive therapeutic treatment, and less expensive concentration on research.
Drugs, plants, chemicals
If the new medicine offers no cure for chronic pain, it will at least be able to provide unfailing relief through electronics or chemicals. In the past decade, the discovery of endorphins, chemicals occurring naturally in the brain to control pain, has led to new generations of safe, effective pain medication to be honed and refined for our future.
Plants as yet undiscovered will provide twenty-first century resources for research. The children of today, your children or mine, may be able as adults to use harmless chemical learning stimulators or memory regulators.
They may have drugs to control hormones or brain chemistry, regulate diabetes long-term, make menopause comfortable, eliminate the effects of Alzheimer’s syndrome, and even control sleep and appetite for space travel applications. Ultra-modern techniques will permit our doctors to inject or tube smaller doses to precise body sites rather than making random systemic irrigations. Is the thought of a robot assisting your doctor too much for you to assimilate?
If scanners are to diagnose us; if computers are to design our treatment program, we must undoubtedly face the probability that robots will get into the picture, too. Jerrold Maxmen, author of Essential Psychopathology, thinks that “The physician will disappear sometime in the first half of the twenty-first century for a variety of reasons…one of which is that he will be too expensive to maintain.”
Hopefully, doctors will not become an endangered species, but it isn’t unlikely that entirely life-like robots will populate the medical facilities of the coming era. Some will be drones, performing repetitive tasks like serving meal trays; others will be capable of at least limited reasoning, such as “if water spills, it must be mopped up.” Some, reminding us of R2D2 and C3PO, will be sophisticated enough to speak. Don’t scoff — prototypes exist. As early as 1985, Ole, the world’s first robot surgeon, assisted a brain surgeon at Memorial Medical Center in Long Beach, California.
Robots could work in quarantine areas where humans would be at high risk. They would be invaluable as lab assistants in nuclear medicine environments. They might handle untested chemicals that could hurt humans. Robots could participate in microsurgery without slippery or nervous fingers to cause irreparable harm to patients.
“Man has elected to fight, not necessarily for himself, but for a process of emotional, intellectual, and ethical growth that goes on forever.”
Arthur Clarke doesn’t see computers, robotics, and future medicine as another way to promote inhuman healing practices. Compare today’s cold, grey-painted, half-heartedly decorated, impersonal medical centers to Clarke’s projection of the future hospital. He sees a warmly human environment with sunlight streaming through glass-walled spaces where furnishings are comfortable and pleasantly mindful of home.
He believes that computerization will eliminate the pressure of overwork and underpay for nursing and peripheral staff, encouraging emphasis on humane, comfortable treatment to reduce patient stress and promote recovery. William Beaumont Hospital, in Michigan, already has a card-activated patient control system. An admitting clerk generates a card that will follow a patient from admission to discharge and even follow-up.
The card, inserted into a terminal in each department, identifies the patient and transmits details of treatment, medication, comments, or chart updates from the keyboard directly to the mainframe computer, eliminating paperwork.
Tomorrow’s hospitals will be the venues for perfecting transplant procedures that give truth to bionic themes common in today’s science fiction. The University of Utah recently replaced a severed human arm with a prosthesis, dubbed the “Thinking Arm,” that could be activated and moved by the recipient’s thought-generated nerve impulses. Do you see the picture?
Micro receptors moved the arm, hand, and fingers when the patient thought about moving. A miracle? Sure, would your grandparents have believed that a machine arm could read your thoughts? Do you believe that there are tiny cameras that can be transplanted into a blind person’s eye, allowing his brain to receive video pictures that simulate sight?
We can already implant electronic receptors into a deaf person’s ear to mimic hearing. Plastic surgery research is on the verge of producing realistic artificial skin to graft over burns or scars. We can transplant hearts, livers, kidneys, veins, arteries, bones, joints, genitals, eyes, limbs….But think, tomorrow’s doctors, probably in your lifetime, will be able to make today’s transplant feats look like a walk in the park.
Just as progress will change medicine in the new millennium, so will it escalate the risks we encounter in our lives. Superspeed ground transport, high-speed air travel, small nuclear accidents, and fusion power casualties all will create trauma requiring highly specialized doctors skilled in determining if a patient has artificial parts or needs them.
It is projected that medical schools will create computer-controlled dolls as teaching aids. Life-size, these dolls will actually be able to simulate a reaction to drugs or trauma; eyes will dilate, respiration will increase or decrease, heart rate will fluctuate, allowing students to experience patient responses in the classroom.
Future medical lives
Decades ago, sci-fi writers predicted outlandish, sometimes frightening futuristic changes for mankind. It was fun to tent the covers over your head at night and read this stuff by flashlight. Now, we approach reality for many of those scary old concepts.
Soon, a newborn baby’s parents will receive a birth certificate showing name, genetic profile, parents, surrogate, sex at birth, projected adult body type, and maybe a suggestion to avoid lung irritants because of a detected genetic respiratory weakness.
The certificate, accompanied by a heat-sensitive photograph that maps hot and cold body areas, will be used as a lifetime health reference. The ability to forecast health concerns — detecting problems long before they are threatening will increase our life expectancy.
The challenge may become one of food production or quality of life versus quantity. Rene Dubos, French futurist, said, “The earth is not a resting place. Man has elected to fight, not necessarily for himself, but for a process of emotional, intellectual, and ethical growth that goes on forever.” It seems that, ready or not, we are about to witness that process.
This is so good! I can hear that your writer's voice is so close to the Maryan of today. You were already so good!
The college where I teach has a patient doll that answers questions and offers symptoms to student nurses. Pretty cool. But also wild that you have it in something written a few years ago.
I'm also with you on the AI-generated intellectual properties. A line must be drawn.
Feel the same!