Medicine and technology Part 2: The Changing Landscape of Medicine

As technology advances the landscape of medicine also changes. So far it has always made medicine more powerful, accurate and efficient. This trend is likely to continue with investments in medical research at an all-time high. This allows us to be more effective in our treatment of our patients. However, what happens when it is our patients that change because of technology.

We can already see the impact that technology is having on the nature of our patients. Increasingly advanced techniques mean that we can salvage babies born so early in their gestation that in previous eras they would not have survived. Not only this but we are able to keep people alive with diseases that would kill them without intervention as well as prolong their years beyond anything that has been achieved before in history. With gene therapy, we are able to personalise treatment and we have even started experimenting with altering an individual’s genome in order to protect them from disease. But perhaps the biggest foreseeable change that is going to occur is the implementation of machine-mind interfaces. That is the integration of computer and brain.

But what is a machine brain interface? The essential concept is to achieve a seamless interface between thought and computer functions. For example, using hardware as an expansion of memory or being able to selectively “download” knowledge much like is seen in the film The Matrix. Furthermore, the goal would be to have a seamless interaction between our internal experience and our external environment, much like we use our smartphones now ton control our environment through various devices. The end point of this may even be to achieve a singular human consciousness through a data stream as opposed to the individuals we have now, and to replace more and more of our biological bodies with computerised augmentation.

Now this might sound like science fiction, but this is already happening all around you. Individuals with intractable epilepsy or Parkinson Disease are already receiving brain implants that manipulate the electrical patterns in their brains in order to control symptoms. Elon Musk of Tesla and PayPal fame has recently founded a new company, NeuroLink whose primary objective is to develop these machine-brain interfaces.

With rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is important for the rest of the world to keep pace. Additionally, to avoid being controlled by a potentially cognizant AI it is important to continue developing, perhaps even to the point of integrating part of it into ourselves. All this means that what it means to be human may radically change. And so too will how we treat our patients, not to mention the pathology that may arise out of these developments. Diseases that up until this point were unimaginable. Rapidly vanishing are the romantic days of the country general practitioner who healed by sound knowledge of the body, sharp examination skills and a good deal of intuition. As the individual and society at large change, so must the services such as health care that keep it running.

Now this might all seem extreme and perhaps concern is premature, however the greater point is that change is inevitable. Technology develops at a faster rate every year. More momentous events have happened in the past hundred years than have perhaps happened in the history of mankind, and this trend is continuing. We will see rapid and drastic developments within our lifetime and it is essential that we look to the future and not rely in the past when we are deciding what we will do with our lives and occupations.