Inasmuch as your original point was that you're utterly ignorant and clueless, and determined to remain that way, I'm happy to have helped you prove your point. But really the credit belongs to you.

Seriously, what are you saying? That I should have put LINKS in my reply to spoon feed you? Would you have read the material I linked? Of course not.

The ACA was never intended to "save a lot of money" but to get health care to a lot of people. It worked and continues to work. Unfortunately, Republicans demanded that it "pay for itself," unlike any other govt undertaking, and thus it had to include a tax on higher income people, which inspired hysterical and deafening opposition, and probably required some "cooking of the books" because stupid Republican demands like "balancing the budget" and "paying for itself" (that they only require of Democratic projects) are impossible to achieve. (Did the Iraq and Afghanistan wars pay for themselves? Hardly!)

Trillion is just a number. It exists whether you like it or not.

If your point was that you're completely ignorant of the issue, you already made it.

It's ok, I'm happy to stipulate it

I didn't say NO surgery. Do we really do less than before? I hadn't known that.

No, I just disproved your points.

What do you mean "even if referenced?"

"Without studies or economic analysis?" My God, what rock can you be living under, to be unfamiliar with all the published studies and analysis of this? There are literally hundreds. ALL saying the same thing. Consult Dr Google and take a look.

Or, just look at the health care systems of EVERY OTHER DEVELOPED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. They have all done what I said. They all spend less than half the money per capita of America. Many if not most have better outcomes by every measure, including longer lifespans and less chronic disease.

By "diseases" I include those of aging, and aging itself. I don't see why cell death should be the norm after we figure out how to keep cells healthy. I think the present human lifespan is a historical accident, limited because in the resource-limited past we had to make room for new generations, and the idea of a finite lifespan has, so to say, outlived its usefulness.

I hope it's not rude to say this to a surgeon, but in 30 years I very much hope for surgery to be rare, and for most diseases to be prevented and/or treated by genetic manipulation. Future generations will look at surgery as we look at bloodletting.

Here's something that's free: Single payer health care and a rational system like the whole rest of the world has would save America approximately half of the money it now spends on its stupid, wasteful, ineffective health care system. Free money in the trillions!

Well yeah, that's why I said "tools" currently. But is there no slippery slope apparent, whereby it assumes more and more functions, e.g., opening, closing, handing you instruments, etc?

Everything you do is predicated on a base of knowledge and experience, right? Is it inconceivable that some and eventually all of that knowledge and experience could reside in an AI database, with the obvious advantages of being continuously updated, and available to practitioners outside the developed-world mainstream of medical information?

With both lower- and higher-level functions increasingly automated.... well, the logical conclusion suggests itself.

If "we" is America, we were prepared for an epidemic, but sadly we were governed at the time by a bunch of drooling knuckle draggers and criminals who ignored the preparations and actually worked against the medical experts to spread disease. Most countries in the world did very much better against COVID because they were prepared and motivated and governed by normal governments

Just as carriage returns, in their turn, were replaced a while back

They still use leeches in medicine! Not as much as in politics of course.

"Remain unaffected?" It's been pretty affected already, I'd suggest. Biotech is some of the hottest tech in terms of innovation. Random example: COVID vaccines. Lifetimes? There are people alive today who were born before antibiotics, before vaccines against polio, smallpox, measles, chicken pox, before effective cancer chemotherapy.

The "medical industry" is almost unrecognizable compared to a lifetime ago, and I'm confident it'll be even more so in our lifetimes, certainly in our children's.

Aren't surgeons lately using robotic tools in the course of their work? Not to replace them, obviously, but as tools esp in, e.g., laparoscopic procedures? Is there a logical progression whereby robots do more functions, and is there some stopping point that prevents them from becoming autonomous?

Indispensable morally and ethically, I agree. But indispensable pragmatically, systemically, in practice? Seems to me that human connection is being dispensed with at an impressive rate in the modern medical matrix, and much of it is already gone.

Sure, I should have said something new shouldn't AUTOMATICALLY or reflexively be feared and loathed. I can respect informed, thoughtful opinions and concerns about potential problems of AI or really anything. But just to say, duh, it'lltakeourjobs based on nothing is to ignore the history of technology, in which every invention does someone's job, but increases wealth and development overall. To me it's like saying, socialism (or dictatorship etc) sounds like a swell idea, without accounting for the historical evidence that it's got a terrible track record everywhere and always.

"Magical" was a poor choice of words too for something that results from smart people working hard. I was thinking of the famous quote, "A sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Nuclear weapons are scary and we've come too close to using them by accident too often. But their very terror has almost certainly prevented various wars, It's unfortunate that the only way to keep us from killing each other seems to be scaring the shit out of us, more specifically ensuring that the attacker will perish just as surely as the defender if he/she attacks.

OK, tech has had immediate bad effects in the sense of, cars replaced horses and what did all the carriage drivers do, or farm machinery made 80% of farmers obsolete, etc. But it turns out they find something else, usually safer, less tedious, and better compensated to do in short order. Partly because the economy grows as a result of the new tech. I didn't mean to imply that there was never displacement or inconvenience. But net net, as they say, the effects of tech are OVERWHELMINGLY positive. We live longer, healthier, freer, and richer with each advance in tech, and it's silly to pretend otherwise. I'd never be so foolish as to say potential negative effects should be ignored; they should be thought about and planned for and minimized, obv. But something new and magical shouldn't be thought of as "the thing that will take our jobs and immiserate us and out-evolve us and compete with us and take over" as one commenter or maybe the op pretty much said.

People not self-selected, so not committed to the subject!

Ohh thanks! Yeah that must be bad when suddenly the riffraff comes stampeding in, like there goes the neighborhood.

So in the centuries since the industrial revolution, life has radically transformed for the better. Everybody "benefits from these innovations." Who did more to make that happen, corporations or governments? Government is inherently reactive, seldom proactive and never inventive. It's a blunt instrument. Governments determined to proactively ensure equality turned out to be socialist hellscapes, and people hated them, and they're almost all gone now. It's pretty much down to Cuba and Berkeley.

No, our best argument is a couple of hundred years of history, filled with inventions that shortsighted people have feared and loathed because they lack imagination. Tech make us vastly better off. Only people with, I dunno, fingers in their ears can't learn this.

I agree. What's a default sub?

"Technology before now only replaced physical power"

You typed those words into a computer. They've been around for 70 years. They don't replace physical power. They evolve about a million times faster than we do, yet they don't seem to be trying to eliminate or impoverish us.

"...guaranteed to lead to widespread unemployment and poverty..."

Just as mechanical looms were sure to impoverish everybody. And every other invention. They've said that about technology for centuries. Some artifact in our brains leads us to imagine imminent doom. Dial phones, farm machinery, every invention was going to be catastrophic. But wow, no doom! It turns out all that scary tech is great for our species. Unemployment? Jobs are both more numerous and more rewarding when technology takes care of the grunt work. The record is crystal clear on this. There's the occasional problematic invention (nuclear bombs and internal combustion engines spring to mind), but the bombs prevented a lot of wars and cars improve standards of living until we cook the planet.

AI will not replace our intellectual power but augment it. That's what tech does. It makes us richer, not poorer. Do you really imagine us in an existential evolutionary struggle for survival with the machines we build to sell each other cheeseburgers and make restaurant reservations? Competing for what sort of resource? It's a curious perspective. The grim future you imagine sounds like the alt-right nonsense about "replacement" by purportedly inferior ethnicities.