Experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance today when wandering into Google to research work-at-home jobs. The reason I was doing such research was that, from where I sit as a medical transcriptionist (MT) for a large transcription company, it looks like technological advances such as speech recognition software and “point-and-click” electronic medical records are going to render us obsolete, probably within a very few short years (one private-practice doctor to whom one of my colleagues spoke said that it would be less than 2 years, and it doesn’t sound like he was a “gloom-and-doomer.” Basically he said that doctors, whether they liked change or not, were going to be forced to adopt point-and-click medical records technology).
You won't hear/see any gloom-and-doom about the future of the transcription industry on Google, however, at least on the first two pages or so of search results. Everything I looked at painted a rosy future for us, a growth industry.
Of course, most of what you run into on a cursory search comes from companies trying to sell you a foothold into this rosy-futured industry. We always must consider the source.
But I'm in the trenches, and the proverbial writing is on the wall. Speech recognition alone has vanished a lot of transcription jobs; point-and-click will disappear the rest.
There's a little "cognitive dissonance" for you.
For me, of course, the probable disappearance of my livelihood is a bad thing, but part of me also feels that, well, this was a long time coming, and probably is the right way to go. It will suck being out on that unemployment line, though.
More packratting, actually kind of related, from a July 27, 1994 journal entry:
I’m going to try to summarize briefly a conversation held in the hallway by my desk yesterday afternoon among Joanne, Mary and Ken. Part of it I only heard pieces of, and I came in after it started, but apparently they were talking about the future of medicine. In some places this is already happening. Doctors as we know them are being replaced by a combination of standardized protocols for the diagnosis and treatment of all kinds of illnesses ranging from urinary tract or ear infections to, presumably, appendicitis, etc., and highly trained technicians who apply the protocols.
“What happened to the ART of medicine?” Mary wailed a time or two. Joanne sounded as though she had had her legs knocked out from under her when she cried in sad desperation about investing so much time in becoming a physician, only to see her job apparently vanish. “Welcome to the club,” I thought, having been troubled for a couple of months, ever since the advent of voice recognition software, by visions of my own impending obsolescence. There was much desperate discussion about doctors’ own failure to protect their profession: “We brought it on ourselves,” Ken said. “People go into specialties so they don’t have to be responsible for the whole patient.” Jean used to say much the same thing--doctors specialize so they don’t have to care about the whole kid, don’t have to worry about the kid’s home life, family substance abuse and its toll, etc. “Specialization is for ants,” Thoreau or somebody said, and that is what has happened or is in the process of happening to medicine. Take specialization to its logical conclusion, and a specialist becomes a technician. Why send a medical student or resident through all the various rotations, if you can take the same person straight out of college, or even high school, and train him to do, say, appendectomies or bilateral myringotomies and tubes? Why would he even need to know about the pancreas or the penis if all he is ever going to do is stick tubes through tympanic membranes, all day, every day, throughout his professional life?
When we were talking about the probable disappearance of my job with the advent of voice recognition software and computers that can transcribe dictation, Mary asked, “But who would edit us?” “Who edited your article in ‘Pediatrics’?” I reminded her. Answer: A computer program. “I still can’t believe it,” I admitted. “I mean, I can see how a computer program could proofread something--that’s what spell checker does, sort of. But I don’t know how it could actually edit,” which, of course, is very different from mere proofreading, looking for spelling and typographical errors. “Program it to write in different styles,” Ken said. “Then you can tell it to write in D H Lawrence’s style, or Hemingway’s.” “What you would do, I suppose, is feed into it every book that has ever been written,” I said. “That’s really how writers learn to write--by reading.” (IS it that simple, I wondered? How could a machine that cannot see, hear, smell, taste or feel--physically or emotionally--learn to write? It could create clear sentences, but could it describe a pastel sunrise or the smell of sizzling bacon on a clear, cool summer morning at your grandparents’ house and all the memories that smell will forever evoke in you? Would it have to be able to? In a society that doesn’t read particularly well, isn’t great writing obsolete, too?).
To say that our world is wobbling would be to understate the case. We’re losing our all-important sense of place in this brave new world of health care and technology. Referring to computer doctors, etc., I told Ken, “Once that particular cat is let out of that particular bag, we’ll never get it stuffed back inside.” He agreed, surprisingly.
Which leaves us where? Beats the hell out of me. I told Mary that, given the rapid approach of the new century and new millennium, if I were religious I would probably be one of those people walking around carrying a sign proclaiming “the end is nigh” or whatever, and start looking around for the Antichrist. “Bill Clinton would do in a pinch,” I said. She laughed.
I’ve cut a lot of this out, mostly on account of being too lazy to type so much after having typed so much already over the past few hours. Obviously I didn’t become obsolete as quickly as I had feared, 17 years ago, and, obviously, doctors haven’t become obsolete. All our lives have changed, though, in some cases very dramatically.
It was an interesting conversation, at least for me. Revisiting it made me think of those coal-mine canaries, again, and how we all sensed that something was going badly wrong. The thread I see now is that we were all sensing the slow but inexorable loss of our humanity. We were/are all being reduced to numbers.
On reflection it strikes me that maybe “reality TV” is just one more, well, reflection of that. We’re all screaming to be seen as individuals. We all want to be recognized as human beings with genuine worth and all that psychobabble stuff.
And we all want to be heard, if only for one brief, life-affirming moment.
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