KOSEN Dinner Event

November 8th, 2015

Attendants: Han Kim, Peter Cho, Matthew Park, Jungmin Lynn
Lee, Hwan Jung, Jungwook Na, Soojin Lee, Minji Kim

Topic: Future Jobs.

At our KOSEN dinner, we had a diverse group of prospective
professionals; dentistry students, pharmacy students,
medical students, and practicing nurses. Our focus was to
ponder upon how the fast-evolving technology will influence
our own future jobs. We started off our discussion by stating
the pros and cons of machines replacing human labour. The
pro was that machines could eliminate human errors and
free the professionals hands to do more sophisticated tasks
at demand. On the other hand, we all firmly agreed upon the
con that machines dont have the intricate level of
intelligence to account for the various aspects of handling
patients: the personal and humane issues. Health care
professionals are easily accessible to the public not only to
answer to medical inquiries, but also to provide emotional
support.

For example, there was an article proposing that robots will

start to replace pharmacists in some hospitals; automated
computers will electronically receive medication orders from
physicians and pharmacists, select and compound
medications, then dispense it to the patient through IV. As
threatening as the idea of machines jeopardizing
pharmacists positions sounds to future pharmacists, we had
concluded that in health care, because peoples lives are
whats at stake, its more important to accommodate for
exceptional circumstances and to take into account each
patients unique health care and personal backgrounds, than
to try to minimize human labour. Every patient is unique in
that they have a unique health background with varying
issues regarding their health as well as personal issues.
Furthermore, we suggested that the idea of being diagnosed,
counselled, and interacting with robots regarding ones
health might deter patients from trusting the health care
system facilitated by machines and robots, and decrease
their adherence to medical care, causing bigger problems
that will need to be amended for at even a greater cost;
more resources, human labour and money will most likely be
needed to amend for the undesirable outcomes and errors.
In essence, our discussion lead to the conclusion that unless
machines are made intelligent enough to account for every
detail and for special circumstances, the act of replacing
tasks of health professionals with machines, could lay
potential benefits, however should be well supervised and
strictly restricted as to not exceed the limits of a robot.