Will Your Future Dentist be a Robot?
With driverless cars, advanced robotics and machine learning all dramatically improving very quickly, it’s easy to worry that we’re about to enter an age where the ordinary human will be out of work. There have been a lot of things published lately, as well as in the past, about artificial intelligence. This is not a new topic but more and more it’s moving quickly to the forefront. Our image is a list of 23 things artificially intelligent computers can do better/faster/cheaper than you can!
Smile Sarasota has always been on the leading edge of technology with things like digital X-rays, intraoral cameras and the CEREC CAD/CAM crowns. However, we believe that there are some things that need the warmth of us humans!
A 2013 study by the Economist Intelligence Unit showed that technology was giving humans the time to focus on more productive tasks, rather than replacing them. Regardless of how much automation our business has, our patients are still going to be people, which means we need that human touch to interact with them. Technology can’t pick up on all of the subtleties of human emotion in the same way, which means they’re not ideal for dealing with real people. They can’t replicate creativity; recombining higher-level abstractions and imagining futures based on very little information or example. They can’t have a hunch, like even scientists do.
In other words, they lack the general underpinning of “common sense” which we have. Robots can’t innovate or think up new ideas. They can’t think out of the box, never mind engage in such human professional skills such as negotiating a sale, building professional relationships, and so on.
Even more fundamentally, behind every technology – no matter how sophisticated and advanced – sits a human to either manage it directly or offer support in the event that it fails or otherwise goes wrong. Especially the understanding and judgment – let alone the empathy – required to successfully deliver services such as dental and medical care; or that lead us to enjoy and value interacting with each other rather than with machines. There are elements of dental care that computers just aren’t capable of handling: chair-side manner, making tough decisions from incomplete patient data, dealing with human psychology, and so forth.
Technology will be integral in changing how care is provided. Healthcare workers such as our fantastic Smile Sarasota team, will remain integral to healthcare because the entire care system is dependent on their knowledge, experience, and intuition. So the next time you visit our office, we know you will appreciate our technology, but even more so, the warm hugs we give you!
Sources and Credits: Seth Godin, Leadspace.com, 247wallst.com, theurbantechnologist.com, makeuseof.com
