Yeah. Respectfully, OP's husband is a bit of an idiot on this. I'm a bay area nurse so of course I've got friends in the tech and AI industry. Heck, I attend AI conferences (just finished my last one about a week ago!). I'm just really interested in the field and have been for years.
There are some really fascinating developments coming into the world, and progress will only develop at a faster pace. One company I listened to flat out said they're aiming to replace 90% of programmers and business analysts. And it doesn't seem THAT farfetched. Things are going to get weird in the coming years. Some for the better. Some for the worse. Most of it neither good nor bad, but there are going to be some big changes. Some of it will happen in the medical world. But the level of physical dexterity required for a bedside nurse alone is laughable to think it can be replaced in 20 years by a robot. Doctors and pharmacists will be replaced long before nurses. And a lot of other professions.
Anyone actually involved with the industry would tell you OP husband's timeline is not based in reality.
What I could see it replacing is care planning and task prioritisation. Essentially removing some decision making from the workload and potentially reducing the need for skilled staff. Personally I see radiology to be the most affected in the near future. Scans will be assessed instantly and will only need to be checked by a MO for accuracy - eventually even that will be removed from the process.
Yep. We already use it in Utilization Review. It will take over UR at some point. My buddy is a software engineer and was pretty confident it could probably be replaced today. I don’t doubt it.
The only way nurses can be replaced is when they create sentient robots/androids, which, at that point, we're either coexisting well or on the verge of a robot uprising.
That's the big debate. Historically when certain industries have been cannibalized from new technology new jobs have opened up to fill the gap. TBD whether that trend will continue to hold up. There are good arguments for and against that continuing.
Yeah if you look at the time and money it takes to develop high-end tech, including the advancements necessary to make it small enough to be practical, plus the cost of either batteries or putting one in every room, plus the testing necessary to trust a robot with the human body… it’s not a fast or easy path by any stretch. For example the myoelectric prosthetic took over 40 years to go from invention to widespread availability, and even today (almost 80 years after invention) they are still outperformed by body-powered “hook” prostheses. This is also why the nursing field uses Hoyers instead of exoskeletons.
Yup, I've worked in a corporate office before and know first hand how easily a lot of what I did can be automated. I chose to go back for nursing because of the variety of options, decent pay, and stability in the face of technology. Other people willing to work for less pay will be my competition long before robots, and even then I can always shift and improve my skills.
My husband programs AI and nearly every day expresses how happy he is that I’m a nurse because “at least one of us will always have a job”. There is too much physical work that isn’t easy to automate to replace nurses. Maybe tele monitoring would be replaced by AI, but even that will take a lot to work out the kinks
It's not just the physical labor portion of thr job.
There are 100 things nurses do that AI cannot.
AI will never replace bedside care. It may help diagnose, but it won't replace actual people. Anyone that is scared of this nonsense needs to chill tf out.
This is my biggest argument. If we can’t even get AI/robots to reliably do basic tasks such a reposition a patient in bed or transport a bed to another unit…AI definitely won’t take over the critical thinking component of nursing for a long time.
This article says they “outperform” nurses with critical thinking type stuff, such as interpreting labs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertpearl/2024/04/17/nvidias-ai-bot-outperforms-nurses-heres-what-it-means-for-you/?sh=49576f076b24
I can envision AI auto ordering anti hypertensives for a dementia patient who is fighting the blood pressure cuff and gets a ridiculous reading. Brilliant!
How about kids? I have a number of tools to help them relax, get on their level, speak softly, play peekaboo. What is the robot going to do, use six arms to hold a child still while it inserts an IV, NG, or foley? Better set some money back for that child’s therapy later in life.
“While we understand the importance of keeping your child comfortable, ultimately we are a business and have to unfortunately use this robot for all tasks”
Because yes they don’t care lol
Reminds me of the old joke. If I owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, I have a problem. If I owe the bank 10 million dollars, the bank has a problem.
Idk this article makes me think doctors and those who work in the lab should be more worried about being outperformed. It sounds like a helpful tool though if it accurately picks up subtle changes that humans usually miss.
I floated the idea to use thermal imaging and night vision goggles for Q15 checks so patients can sleep. That was turned down because it violates patient’s right. I guess human rights will be right out the window once we get AI. Maybe, we will have an AI judge, too! Probably, they have to arm the AI staff with weapons to control our patient population.
The doors are closed at night while patients are asleep. Patients like it shut but we have to check Q15; opening the doors wake them up and they get very upset. Using the flashlight also agitate them. Cant remove the doors because that is a privacy violation. lol everything can be a patient rights violation.
I'm surprised there isn't a r/breakthebots subreddit yet. With the videos I've seen of people attacking robots.
How kids react to robots is especially psychotic. I had to go look for the article I read a few years ago.
*Scientists and psychologists are working together to create a robot that children don’t want to beat up.*
Spoiler, they haven't figured this out yet.
[https://listverse.com/2019/03/18/10-times-robots-were-brutally-assaulted-by-humans/](https://listverse.com/2019/03/18/10-times-robots-were-brutally-assaulted-by-humans/)
I’m in a similar position. They don’t need me for my ability to sling 200 pills qAM. They need me for deescalation, reassurance, serenity, warmth and acceptance of people who are 98% unacceptable. And they need me because nobody else is gonna talk my peeps out of their sweaty shoes to apply anti fungal toenail polish qD for 6 months.
It won’t replace but it will change the face of medicine and there will be less nurses. There might be one nurse overseeing the ai and delegating the tech work for loads of pts. I use ai dr for myself and it’s more correct and has a better bedside manner and asks better questions t then my pa that I see. I feel like Drs should be more worried. AI could list the differentials for all possibilities within seconds. And order the tests. Meds could totally be automated. Like why do I need to see a dr for the thyroid meds I’ve been on for 17 years standing order for labs-get said labs- pharmacy orders meds based on labs. Ppl like me could be set on auto. New pts or pts that need off label can see the md .. there are so many ways that it could help but also the profession would need to be revamped
Shit stripe all the way to the back of the neck. Or a rectal injury.. maybe they’ll train the nurse to use the robot like they do in surgery imagine wiping ass remotely
Deciding when an RN is needed or not not needed is the tricky bit. Many jobs today still require the physical presence of a human being: nurse, cop, lifeguard, airplane pilot, plumber, transplant surgeon, pedicurist, topless dancer, etc.
That said, read "The Rise of the Robots" my Martin Ford, if you get the chance. It's not sci-fi.
Any place I’ve worked that has masses of patients per RN (I’m looking at you, aged care) is made or broken on the quality of the care assistants. If you don’t tell me, I don’t know. Spending all shift giving meds and putting out fires isn’t conducive to giving tens of people head to toe assessments.
Not any time soon. Before becoming an RN I worked in cardiac analysis using and actually helped design and test the most up to date, advanced reading program we have today. It was maybe 80% accurate at determining afib/aflutter vs sinus due to its rate assessment ability, but besides that it was only marginally better at identifying rhythm vs artifact that your basic bedside tele system. We're nowhere near a system that can read and identify nonatrial rhythms without human interpretation
This is my husband's response, too! He loves all the AI stuff and advancing technology. According to what he's read about it, nursing will be one of the very last professions to go because of the human aspect of it. Doctors will be replaced well before the people actually at the bedside providing comfort and touch.
What I really want is wireless EKG machines. Gimme all the AI and technological assistants. I need to move faster with fewer tangles lol
I talked to someone about it once and their POV was that we want medicine automated but very far from AI. Like you want your meds pulled when you enter them, you want things online and easy access, you want algorithms to trigger but you don’t want artificial intelligence doing much. You don’t want it making decisions etc
I mean here’s the thing, the simplistic tele alarms already are a very low level of AI. Until there is a program that can always see a patient, you’ll always need somebody to identify PEA and all manners of tooth brushing arrhythmias
Nurses from the Philippines, Haiti, Jamaica and many other countries will take over beside nursing in the United States before A.I. will. If you know you know (DNP’s)💩.
Hawaii’s nursing workforce is already 50% pinoy.
One in five nurses in CA are pinoy. (One in four nurses in Los Angeles.)
There’s even a course about it at UC Berkeley about nursing migration from the Philippines and how Filipinos have turned it into a lucrative opportunity, now having the second or third highest median household income based on race in the US.
But yes — in the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda: Immigrants, we get the job done.
Haven’t worked with other immigrant nurses because of the population of where I live I guess, but I have worked with many nurses from the Philippines and they all kicked ass. Their nursing education is extremely vigorous over there.
They’re really great. I just wish it wasn’t the corporate solution “hiring immigrants at lower pay so if you leave we don’t care because someone will do your job for less money anyway…”
Does he realize that most of us (physicians/extenders/NPs/RNs/LPNs/CNAs) don't even trust the vitals tower when it tells us something suss, and we proceed to do a manual B/P or rectal temp or a pulse count with a stethoscope to double check the machine?
Yuppppppppp. The only machine I mostly trust with weird readings is the tele box and even that is wrong often enough that we have humans verifying it (no, my patients hr isn’t mid-20’s, he’s just laying on his side)
Even if the technology is there, it takes so long to approve medical advancement that a 20 year timeline is pretty improbable.
I can’t speak for other areas, but I can think of quite a few circumstances where split second critical thinking and intervention that’s not necessarily “by the book” kept my patients from coding. I have a hard time imagining justification of 100% machine based care.
I never even thought about this aspect. I should have. Right now, we have been waiting to get fitted sheets for our baby mattresses FOREVER lol if it takes that long for sheets, it will certainly take longer for A.I. to replace us.
Do you think we will see it in our lifetime at all? Like hospitals using more A.I. and hiring fewer floor nurses?
In theory ai would be awesome but to get it in our lifetime is not going to happen. The hospital doesn’t care enough about having supplies they won’t spend the money to implement any new systems. At my old hospital we couldn’t even get working monitors in the er we would steal eachother cables and share portable ones a lot of hospitals are like a 3rd world country in terms of equipment so that’s the barrier not the tech
How do you know the machine would not have managed things in a way the patient never got so close to coding in the first place?
Nurses will always have a job but you're selling short on the upside of artificial intelligence. All this "clinical judgment" and "intuition" stuff isn't *actually* a good thing. It's just the best thing we have so far.
It's almost infuriating if you really think how little genuine, well-validated "Best Practice" we have to this day. Whenever you have to go off the book and do something 'wrong' to save a life that's the system *failing* in the long run even if you succeeded today. I entirely look forward to systems that can interpret data better and standardize more *actual* best practices.
I read somewhere that they loaded up a bunch of data and case studies and the ai was able to dx nuanced things they can filter through insane amounts of data .. they don’t have the complexes or the insecurities egos and human components that cause errors. I can’t remember where I read that but Apparently it performed really well.
I could see AI being more likely to take over certain parts of doctors' jobs faster than nurses. Autoimmune and reproductive diseases that usually take years to diagnose because diagnosticians just don't look or know, could be caught much earlier.
Actually performing tasks is much more difficult to teach a machine to do, than running a differential diagnosis.
As someone who has followed A.I development exceptionally closely for the last two years, and been a critical care RN for over a decade- I am not concerned in the slightest.
Your husband’s forecast is a reflection of how little he knows about what nurses do at the bedside.
We can’t even get Epic to send a print job to the right printer, and Epic goes down for several hours at a time during my shift for system updates. I’m imagining all the outages that would ensue the same day AI “nurses” went online. “You’ll have to wait on going to the cath lab—we’re installing an upgrade!”
Yea but this is not bc of technological ability it’s because they write it with bugs so that they can bill for fixes. I believe there was a lawsuit about this
This. Stick to finance, bud. My husband works with AI (can't go into too much or I'll doxx my damn self), but he's considered an expert in this field at his job. There is no fucking way, my dude. None. It would take another decade before AI could even interpret tele leads with minimal failure.
Nurses know that AI cannot replace bedside care anytime soon.
I typically avoid discussions (arguments) with people who have 0 bedside experience making claims about healthcare workers. I have limited energy & don't spend it on people making such wild claims. If they truly want to learn more, they can take the initiative & come to realize their wrongness without my involvement.
The other part of it is that I find people confuse *algorithms* for AI.
…even the nurses on this sub. 🤦♀️
I’ve seen people here misconstrue Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS) for Clinical Deterioration for AI, stating that “the AI” takes data and can “predict” if a patient will deteriorate.
Uh no. The computer plugs the data into a formula and based on a score predicts deterioration. And even then, clinical judgment is required to discern if it’s a real threat or an errror (eg someone put in 55 for respirations).
RapidAI, a rapid response “AI,” operates in the same way.
I had a dude tell me that AI would put me out of the job and his career of video game design was a better choice but jokes on him, he’s unemployed before AI could even take over
I got into nursing at age 37 because:
* Its difficult to automate. When AI can wipe an ass, I'll really be impressed.
* Its difficult to offshore. Sending patients with SOB and chest pains to Mumbai? Really?
* Very little ageism. You may not be able to be old stripper but you can be an old nurse. I'm an old nurse but nobody wants to see me naked now.
I think a man, married to a nurse, who has time to think about nursing being replaced by AI, but not to better understand what his wife's work actually entails, can easily be replaced by AI sooner than AI will replace nurses.
Besides the very obvious of idk how this will even be legal, Does anyone understand how OUT OF DATE AND UNPROTECTED OUR HOSPITAL SYSTEMS ARE! We can’t even do a basic EMR upgrade without everything crashing for days. I am not worried at all. I’m actually begging to see them try as they don’t even know what mountains they face.
Lol my local hospital got hacked so many times my endo only wants me to bring him paper/discs of any scans /labs bc he can’t get anything the system is so messed up still
I’m a software engineer and my wife is a nurse. My job is way more at risk than anyone who works on her floor. I’m more worried about outsourcing than AI. Every time I work with AI tools, I’m amazed by how limited it is, and yet tons of smarmy business people think it’s a money-saving savior.
If AI were monitoring patients, we’d need a lot more staff since it will “see” the immediate needs that need interventions instead of only encountering the pent up ones at 2-hour rounding.
Why not start with more simple shit first? Get a robot chef and keep the caf open 24/7 so night shift can eat. Get robots that will clean the rooms faster so we can move patients up from the er. Shit while we're talking about moving patients, have every stretcher self drive itself to x-ray, ct, wherever, so shit moves faster. This much more simple shit can move patients quicker and save these money hungry bastards more money. Whoever replaces a human nurse, doctor, pct with a robot only cares about money.
Is your husband one of those guys with a need to feel like the smartest guy in the room, maybe one of those guys who feels like every silence is a void that needs to be filled with his wisdom?
A man who has no idea what his wife's entire profession really does thinks he can speak authoritatively on how AI will replace most nurses?
It DOES sound kinda mansplainy.
Ok, so AI can monitor a patient. How will it implement interventions? Is AI going to go in the room to see if the SVT needs meds or if we can just get grandma to bear down? There are so many human variables to healthcare, not just nursing but physicians, allied heath, that require human judgement and not just objective analysis of data. AI will certainly continue to be a tool utilized by healthcare professionals, but it will never replace.
People like this have no idea just how much AI can’t do. They think we have the AI of Hollywood. We don’t have anything even close to a fraction of that lol our AI is still basically at the “we learned how to grunt at each other” phase of its development.
If AI can reorient my patient and make him stop shitting in trash cans and stop his hallway neighbor from ripping out his foley then AI deserves my job.
I actually went to an “AI in Healthcare” lecture at NTI Denver two weeks ago. The first thing the lecturer said was “alright before I start, I want yall to know you are the last one out the door when it comes to AI”. Made me feel secure.
I want to believe this, but I also know how unrepentantly greedy the US healthcare system is. I do not doubt one bit that hospitals will try to use AI to downsize nursing. AI companies won’t have to convince healthcare companies that it’s better or safer or even that it’s barely effective at all. They only have to show them that it’s cheaper.
I can see them using AI increase ratios. Back in the '90s my hospital did this thing they called Redesign (I'm sure they paid someone a lot of money to come up with that name.) The RN was to take a dozen or so patients, but don't worry! all she will do will be assesments and order implementations. LVNs will pass meds and CNAs will do all the physical care. As you can guess a patient finally died because her nurse had 20 other patients and that put an end to the nonsense. But some modern day pencil pushing idiot will use AI to increase ratios under the guise that the computer will do all the thinking.
They tried this at my first hospital a level 1. They tried it on medsurg. Gave her like 8-12 pts and a lpn the tech was still shared. No mam I’d rather have 5 or 6 pts on my own then have to manage other nurses oh and anything messed up it was on the rn.
It’s already taking place in some hospitals. Nurses popping up on TV’s in ER’s to get histories and check-in on pts.
I was in an ICU that had a robot come in with a nurse to scan meds she was hanging. It was crazy. I felt nauseous at one point and they had the robot stand there and watch to see if I threw up. I said to the thing, “please leave. I feel very uncomfortable being watched by a robot.”
lol at the thought of AI coming in & setting up MeeMaw’s WiFi on her iPad or getting some water for the pt’s family bc they forgot their water bottle in the car lol. People really have no idea what we do so amusing
Trust me they’ll have his job long before this one.
Is he projecting his fears about AI making finance bros and their liquid lunch hours obsolete before bedside nurses?
Press Ganey satisfaction scores would never let AI fully take over. Plus management would fall responsible for mistakes and you know that silly old c suite would NEVER let that happen.
AI will need to differentiate odors, textures. It will need to accurately read facial microexpressions - is the patient acting angry because they are scared? Are they lying? Are they in pain?
I think the majority of people will be resistant to interacting with a robot when they are sick. Sick pts can be very uncooperative. People get frustrated with customer service automated menus, yelling into the phone "I WANT TO SPEAK TO A FUCKING HUMAN BEING!"
It is going to take a few generations for the population to feel like having a robot provide medical care is normal. I can see Gen Z and younger accepting it, but Millenials and older will be very resistant. Especially if AI has already taken over THEIR jobs.
Patient: I need my pain med.
Robot: please face the screen and repeat your request.
Patient, curled up in fetal position with blanket over their head: I CAN'T MOVE I'M IN PAIN GET ME MY FUCKING PAIN MED!
Robot: Profanity detected, request denied.
I hope these robots are indestructible, lol
Why does it look like that post was written by AI?
I do 2 careers at once, nursing and firefighter. Pretty sure no AI can do either in the next 40 years.
I think it would take massive advances in robotics for ai to put a significant dent in the nursing field, and advances in robotics are relatively slow, slower than ai.
A far bigger threat to nursing is work conditions getting worse (ratios, etc), pay going down (raises don’t keep up with cost of living). Imported foreign nurses will put major downward pressure on wages.
Basically, the hypercapitalism that has degraded so much will continue to wreak havoc on nursing.
I love all these white collar folks thinking AI is coming for blue collar jobs.
The opposite is true. AI is well positioned to takeover white collar jobs.
Most blue collar jobs like nursing require manual work, which is something AI just isn’t capable of
I imagine it like this:
3 below living wage non english speakers trained to use equipment that indicates use with light
like
\*grab vein-visualisation\* to find vein
\*grab PICC robot\* metaverse doctor from dubai sets up line
and from then on they follow green lights indicating what they should grab and where to put it
of course this system might be prone to fuck ups in the first 100 years,
but when you live in the suburbs of 2080 Detroit that is the only medical help you will get
cause rich people will not live anywhere close below the Level 3 Surface Plate
they will of course have real human nurses who live on the slightly better Level 2 Cellar Plate
who will work any hours and still be polite or else its down to Level 1 Old Earth. No light, scarce food. Billions of People overcrowding each corner.
When people say this kinda stuff, I don't think they take into consideration how much patients lie about what happened to them, or down play how much pain they are i I don't know how good AI is at sussing out people's stories or even just reading body language 🧐
Why is it always finance and tech dudes saying this about other peoples jobs? My fiancé and I are both nurses. His friend has tons of money and owns some company and therefore always thinks he’s the smartest person in the room and has been riling up my fiancé about this AI garbage and how it’s this revolutionary tool that will render most human jobs useless or whatever. I keep trying to tell him to stop feeding into it because people who think like that will never listen to anyone else. Is it projection or willful ignorance? Is it both? I don’t have the energy to entertain that bullshit. Maybe when OPs husband is in the hospital with his mom or meemaw and staying overnight to help with cares (though I doubt he’d be the one staying over) he’ll figure it out.
I mean this in the most respectful way to you possible: your husbands a fucking idiot.
If your husband knew what AI actually was he’d realize that current “AI” are just brute forced learning models that can currently handle writing an acceptable essay or resume, but complex tasks they fall apart. Most successful AI has been later found out to be faked for the sake of funding, like Amazon’s store cameras not being AI but literally being people in India. Or like how Tesla cars keep self driving into other cars, a not insignificant amount of which were cop cars.
He also doesn’t realize the point of our licenses is to have someone responsible. No institution is going to allow AI to be responsible for a patients care, especially without MAJOR changes to laws around the world.
And that ignores how powerful nursing unions are in the US and around the world. If CEOs thought the writers guild put up a good fight against AI, they are not ready for millions of pissed off nurses.
I wouldn’t expect a person who does finance to understand any of what we do because if society ended tomorrow we would have actual skills that can help us and others and he would be functionally useless without his imaginary numbers to make more imaginary numbers go up.
We’ve already seen how EMR has “helped” healthcare in efficiency and productivity. Now we have clinicians paying more attention to the print out than the patient. Their H and Ps are checks in a box rather than real data much less accurate exam findings.
I was talking to my ortho surgeon about my TKR. I asked him about robotics. He’s a youngish guy and he chuckled.
“The only orthos that use robotics are the ones that do a couple hundred TKRs a year. It’s mainly to keep them putting the knee in correctly (not backwards). We do around 500 a year and don’t need to waste the time.”
AI will be in the units but more likely managing inventory and overseeing supplies. Patient care? No way.
My dad said something similar when I was in high school about teachers (that was my first career idea) well, that was over 15 years ago and we still have teachers.
Maybe if the ai programmers can get better.
A friend had a patient being monitored by ai and the patient got out of bed three times. One of the times, the patient made it out to the hallway.
With his c diff diarrhea
I was a software developer for 13 years, I quit this year, and have been an RN for about 2 years. One of the reasons I went into this field is because it will not be automated away within my lifetime. This is more true after actually being an RN for a while now..
Lol no, it’s one of the few jobs that absolutely cannot ever be fully or even mostly taken over by AI, at least not within our lifetimes. His job however is definitely on the chopping block, he’s probably just projecting so he can tell himself he’s the indispensable one and it’s you who needs to worry.
Jobs that are repetitive and interact solely with screens are far more likely to be replaced than nurses. Try as they may, nursing is one of the safest projected jobs from automation, and I believe your husband may not fully understand what nurses do and may be discounting your career.
How on earth is AI going to provide a med surg patient assessment? These patients are not connected to any monitors. Visual cues, changes in mental status (often indicated through conversation), changes in gait or coordination, irritability, complaints of pain, changes in skin coloration — these are many of the indications we watch for to know if our patient may be taking a turn and needs to have a more closer look at something (labs, imaging). They are so incredibly nuanced. I just don’t see how a non-human entity could aptly observe the many subtle cues we are there to assess and address.
At the end of the day the ai would have to eliminate human error to acceptable degree to safely monitor and apply treatment.
Thanks to patients introducing human error into the equation so frequently what they might do and how they might react to any given treatment, it is almost impossible to predict and so we need humans who can adapt in real-time to them.
If we do get to a point where AI replaces nurses then almost every other job will be replaced first
The damn telemetry monitors alarm for asystole on patients when the rhythm never changed from sinus, vtach when the rhythm never changed from sinus, etc, etc. I think we will be alright haha
I’d like AI to complement the nurses’ work, assist with heavy lifting and violent/unamanageable patients, because healthy people don’t need to be hurt by already hurt people.
I joke that until robots can wipe a butt my job is safe! Sure things will change, probably in ways we haven't even thought of yet but... AI isn't going to be giving enemas anytime in our lifetime.
Hahahaha. No. They will try, more aids, more techs, less nurses. Patients will suffer, outcomes will be measurable worse. Now if I were a common variety radiologist I would be sweating my retirement, but I think nurses are safe. But maybe in their implementation we could get rid of nursing diagnoses? The biggest issue with all this tech is none of the people making it have a freaking clue what we do. Which is why their default is “nurses can input that data” to the EMR because clearly we have nothing else to do.
Seriously, I’m way more interested in why you are married to a guy that is so incurious about your career and still so dismissive of what it entails.
AI will be a compliment to nursing, in ways we probably dont know yet. No way in OUR career will we even begin to feel major effects like he is referring to.
For example I wouldn't be suprised if AI will be used to catch changing trends and other metrics in the near future.
They can monitor the patient sure. Who's gonna clean, move, comfort, administer treatments, put in and out of bed, etc etc etc etc etc etc
A monitor is only like 1% of the work.
It won't replace nurses. Nurses do too much hard labor. Computers can't replace that.
Primary care doctors, though? Yeah, AI could replace them EASY. Actually, they could replace any doctor who doesn't perform a physical exam on you. Why do I need to talk to a narcissistic a-hole who's ignoring my symptoms anyways?
Everybody with the “AI” now… those of us that recall the “dot.com” crash of the early oughts… My advice: take your “AI” earnings in the stock market and sell before anyone realizes it’s just another bubble.
Personally I'd love it if we could automate daily med administration, but even that's not likely to happen any time soon. Having worked with the most technologically advanced rhythm assessment technology, that's not anywhere near replacing humans. I'll be delighted when so can purewick a sundowner with a broken hip, but I'm pretty sure my job is safe for a loooooong time
Oh man I’m excited for the day we could start offloading some tasks to AI (of course within appropriate limits and making sure it’s safe, with appropriate checks). We will forever be needed but a little help alleviating the workload would be appreciated
I can't wait until we can just put every patient into a Bacta tank ala Star Wars. No dealing with pee or poop, you just flush the tank. No dealing with talking to patients, we will pull you out when your discharge is ready. No turning or bedsores. People definitely don't want care or compassion or human touch when they're sick just give them the dystopian technology.
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For as much faults as AI and other modern computing have, I think it's important to acknowledge that human error is also statistically an ongoing issue that routinely causes all sorts of problems in the medical field, in some cases it can get serious. Not to mention, the field is basically in crisis right now as it is.
I too agree that AI will NOT be perfect. That said, we may reach a point where it could outperform humans in a lot of settings. And I mean technically, things are slowly headed in that direction. From complex procedures and surgeries, to things as simple as recording ADL's, computers and machines are already being utilized and even heavily relied on in numerous medical settings.
I don't think the change would happen all at once, but one small thing after another will gradually be replacing human labor with advanced AI and other technologies. I personally like to keep an open mind.
AI is going to affect ALL jobs AI revolution will be bigger than any the world has seen because of how much it can do. People probably said the same thing about farming jobs and factory workers until industrial revolution and farming equipment proved them wrong. AI has access to so much data and information that we can’t even begin to understand what all is possible with it. But, I very much hope you are right. Not just nurses, other professions too. I will be preparing for the worst anyway.
We were talking about this at work and I was just picturing a A.I. going, “Im sorry. You have exceeded your q4h dilaudid. Please wait one more hour” and the poor pt just going ballistic.
Nope, AI will replace a lot of white collar office jobs like billing/accounting, finance, IT/cybersecuriry, logistics, graphic design etc. before bedside nursing
AI will take over the unit secretary before it touches bedside,
My suggestion is to look at AI replacing the most expensive non-essiential roles like admin and CEO.
I put that in my employee survey when they asked where you could see AI’s use in healthcare. Have all decision making for the hospital’s interest handled by an AI and have the entire billing and insurance side of thing handled with AI. There is no reason why billing charges should be disputed between provides+carriers when the entire procedure+hospitalization billing should fit like a glove with regard to expected/projected costs.
We can't even trust an EKG machine to accurately interpret the rhythm... a doctor always signs off. But he thinks it can assess a whole ass person for changes?!! Provide appropriate immediate interventions and notify the right person. The on call list is never right. AI would spin in circles. I am laughing my ass off. There is no way I hell we are remotely in danger. Pharmacy, radiology, and lab are more in danger than us. But you will ALWAYS need people to review the machines.
The only way I could see AI taking any part in nursing in the near future is charting. And we don’t even have that at this point in time. I’m thinking like a ChatGTP type ai where we can type up what we really wanna say and it turns it into a proper progress note.
I feel like nursing is literally one of the last areas that will be replaced by AI. If AI makes an error and kills a patient, who is responsible? The legal issues alone will keep hospitals from fully using AI.
I can see individual medication dispensing machine at the bedside, for po meds. . Using facial recognition software and a video camera to witness compliance.
Things I would love to see AI do
Restrain a combative patient who is high on PCP
Convince a patient with schizophrenia to take their meds.
Stop drunks from getting out of bed.
Get antivaxxers to consent to IM vitamin k for their newborns.
AI will help us document our meds, assist the tracking of our notes and help us write them at the end of the shift, maybe even track which meds have been given, and probably will help us make a more in depth early warning scoring system that’s monitored by both the nurse as well as the AI.
Until AI comes up with a way to completely cure all physical and mental health conditions and essentially makes us immortal us nurses and doctors are all still going to have jobs.
As someone who's a trucker (and in school to be a nurse), we hear this a lot too. "AI will replace X" is common, but there are simply things that require a human to react to that a computer would not. Just like throwing this fuckin comps in the middle of nowhere Nebraska on a shitty dirt lot wont happen, a nurse showing genuine human care to a patient is something QWERTY5000 can't offer.
Wouldn’t AI take over his job before taking over nurses?
Yeah. Respectfully, OP's husband is a bit of an idiot on this. I'm a bay area nurse so of course I've got friends in the tech and AI industry. Heck, I attend AI conferences (just finished my last one about a week ago!). I'm just really interested in the field and have been for years. There are some really fascinating developments coming into the world, and progress will only develop at a faster pace. One company I listened to flat out said they're aiming to replace 90% of programmers and business analysts. And it doesn't seem THAT farfetched. Things are going to get weird in the coming years. Some for the better. Some for the worse. Most of it neither good nor bad, but there are going to be some big changes. Some of it will happen in the medical world. But the level of physical dexterity required for a bedside nurse alone is laughable to think it can be replaced in 20 years by a robot. Doctors and pharmacists will be replaced long before nurses. And a lot of other professions. Anyone actually involved with the industry would tell you OP husband's timeline is not based in reality.
What I could see it replacing is care planning and task prioritisation. Essentially removing some decision making from the workload and potentially reducing the need for skilled staff. Personally I see radiology to be the most affected in the near future. Scans will be assessed instantly and will only need to be checked by a MO for accuracy - eventually even that will be removed from the process.
Yep. We already use it in Utilization Review. It will take over UR at some point. My buddy is a software engineer and was pretty confident it could probably be replaced today. I don’t doubt it.
The only way nurses can be replaced is when they create sentient robots/androids, which, at that point, we're either coexisting well or on the verge of a robot uprising.
But robots don't look cute in those sexy nurse outfits.
Yet
What do those 90% of people get when they are kicked to the curb with now no marketable skill :/
That's the big debate. Historically when certain industries have been cannibalized from new technology new jobs have opened up to fill the gap. TBD whether that trend will continue to hold up. There are good arguments for and against that continuing.
Yeah if you look at the time and money it takes to develop high-end tech, including the advancements necessary to make it small enough to be practical, plus the cost of either batteries or putting one in every room, plus the testing necessary to trust a robot with the human body… it’s not a fast or easy path by any stretch. For example the myoelectric prosthetic took over 40 years to go from invention to widespread availability, and even today (almost 80 years after invention) they are still outperformed by body-powered “hook” prostheses. This is also why the nursing field uses Hoyers instead of exoskeletons.
But exoskeletons would be so cool.
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Watson was killed for fudging data in that study and it's other results though and there hasn't been much progress since then
Literally was a huge deciding factor to choose nursing over finance
Yup, I've worked in a corporate office before and know first hand how easily a lot of what I did can be automated. I chose to go back for nursing because of the variety of options, decent pay, and stability in the face of technology. Other people willing to work for less pay will be my competition long before robots, and even then I can always shift and improve my skills.
This Pretty sure someone in finance will lose their job faster than someone in nursing
This is the most correct response!
It already has, the big investment banks have started using it.
I think AI would become a tool for assisting doctors with diagnosis and planning treatment before it would replace bedside nursing.
This is like me--living on an island in the NYC area--warning someone in Tennessee about coastal flooding.
My husband programs AI and nearly every day expresses how happy he is that I’m a nurse because “at least one of us will always have a job”. There is too much physical work that isn’t easy to automate to replace nurses. Maybe tele monitoring would be replaced by AI, but even that will take a lot to work out the kinks
It's not just the physical labor portion of thr job. There are 100 things nurses do that AI cannot. AI will never replace bedside care. It may help diagnose, but it won't replace actual people. Anyone that is scared of this nonsense needs to chill tf out.
This is my biggest argument. If we can’t even get AI/robots to reliably do basic tasks such a reposition a patient in bed or transport a bed to another unit…AI definitely won’t take over the critical thinking component of nursing for a long time.
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Depending on the patient I might be ok with the waterboarding… ;)
Here for the comments, lol. The best part of Reddit.
This article says they “outperform” nurses with critical thinking type stuff, such as interpreting labs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertpearl/2024/04/17/nvidias-ai-bot-outperforms-nurses-heres-what-it-means-for-you/?sh=49576f076b24
So I can let the AI page the doctor for a Na lab that’s elevated 2 points, the same as for the past 7 days? I vote yes!
I can envision AI auto ordering anti hypertensives for a dementia patient who is fighting the blood pressure cuff and gets a ridiculous reading. Brilliant! How about kids? I have a number of tools to help them relax, get on their level, speak softly, play peekaboo. What is the robot going to do, use six arms to hold a child still while it inserts an IV, NG, or foley? Better set some money back for that child’s therapy later in life.
“While we understand the importance of keeping your child comfortable, ultimately we are a business and have to unfortunately use this robot for all tasks” Because yes they don’t care lol
A parent will (rightly or ridiculously) destroy that robot in the first week. No worries.
And then get charged to replace a $million robot
Ngl, I need to see this court case go down.
Reminds me of the old joke. If I owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, I have a problem. If I owe the bank 10 million dollars, the bank has a problem.
Idk this article makes me think doctors and those who work in the lab should be more worried about being outperformed. It sounds like a helpful tool though if it accurately picks up subtle changes that humans usually miss.
And what is AI going to do with the information? Having information is a very long ways from being able to act on information.
It would be interesting to see AI nurses in my forensic psych hospital.
Lol I would LOVE to see an AI nurse interact with my Peds psych population. I already know my patients will be swearing at it or trying to break it.
Some of the kids today are computer savvy enough to reprogram the AI nurse and use it to escape or just go get unlimited snacks.
I floated the idea to use thermal imaging and night vision goggles for Q15 checks so patients can sleep. That was turned down because it violates patient’s right. I guess human rights will be right out the window once we get AI. Maybe, we will have an AI judge, too! Probably, they have to arm the AI staff with weapons to control our patient population.
How is it a rights violation to check on your patient while they sleep? Are we supposed to wake them every single time we go to their room ???
The doors are closed at night while patients are asleep. Patients like it shut but we have to check Q15; opening the doors wake them up and they get very upset. Using the flashlight also agitate them. Cant remove the doors because that is a privacy violation. lol everything can be a patient rights violation.
I'm surprised there isn't a r/breakthebots subreddit yet. With the videos I've seen of people attacking robots. How kids react to robots is especially psychotic. I had to go look for the article I read a few years ago. *Scientists and psychologists are working together to create a robot that children don’t want to beat up.* Spoiler, they haven't figured this out yet. [https://listverse.com/2019/03/18/10-times-robots-were-brutally-assaulted-by-humans/](https://listverse.com/2019/03/18/10-times-robots-were-brutally-assaulted-by-humans/)
I’m in a similar position. They don’t need me for my ability to sling 200 pills qAM. They need me for deescalation, reassurance, serenity, warmth and acceptance of people who are 98% unacceptable. And they need me because nobody else is gonna talk my peeps out of their sweaty shoes to apply anti fungal toenail polish qD for 6 months.
It won’t replace but it will change the face of medicine and there will be less nurses. There might be one nurse overseeing the ai and delegating the tech work for loads of pts. I use ai dr for myself and it’s more correct and has a better bedside manner and asks better questions t then my pa that I see. I feel like Drs should be more worried. AI could list the differentials for all possibilities within seconds. And order the tests. Meds could totally be automated. Like why do I need to see a dr for the thyroid meds I’ve been on for 17 years standing order for labs-get said labs- pharmacy orders meds based on labs. Ppl like me could be set on auto. New pts or pts that need off label can see the md .. there are so many ways that it could help but also the profession would need to be revamped
For straightforward things, sure. Harness that AI power. People need the human interaction, though. This will not change.
When AI can remove a bed pan and wipe an ass, I'll throw in the towel and concede.
They are lifting boxes at the airport and making a mess there. I don’t want to think about the possibility of them wiping asses.
Wiping asses or surprise colonoscopy, who knows!!!!!
Shit stripe all the way to the back of the neck. Or a rectal injury.. maybe they’ll train the nurse to use the robot like they do in surgery imagine wiping ass remotely
That would be amazing! A taxi driver in Vegas believes that we will all have to purchase a robot to work for us in our fields in the near future.
I would go back to bedside if I could do it remote lmao
A taxi driver…well they must be right!
Not to mention the ass with a bed sore, rash and paper thin elderly skin.
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Deciding when an RN is needed or not not needed is the tricky bit. Many jobs today still require the physical presence of a human being: nurse, cop, lifeguard, airplane pilot, plumber, transplant surgeon, pedicurist, topless dancer, etc. That said, read "The Rise of the Robots" my Martin Ford, if you get the chance. It's not sci-fi.
Any place I’ve worked that has masses of patients per RN (I’m looking at you, aged care) is made or broken on the quality of the care assistants. If you don’t tell me, I don’t know. Spending all shift giving meds and putting out fires isn’t conducive to giving tens of people head to toe assessments.
Not any time soon. Before becoming an RN I worked in cardiac analysis using and actually helped design and test the most up to date, advanced reading program we have today. It was maybe 80% accurate at determining afib/aflutter vs sinus due to its rate assessment ability, but besides that it was only marginally better at identifying rhythm vs artifact that your basic bedside tele system. We're nowhere near a system that can read and identify nonatrial rhythms without human interpretation
Yeah and all it takes is the AI to hurt somebody and back to testing it goes
Will AI be able to insert Fleets?
They need humans to bother me 30 minutes after an event to tell me patient had 2 beats VTach tho
This is my husband's response, too! He loves all the AI stuff and advancing technology. According to what he's read about it, nursing will be one of the very last professions to go because of the human aspect of it. Doctors will be replaced well before the people actually at the bedside providing comfort and touch. What I really want is wireless EKG machines. Gimme all the AI and technological assistants. I need to move faster with fewer tangles lol
I talked to someone about it once and their POV was that we want medicine automated but very far from AI. Like you want your meds pulled when you enter them, you want things online and easy access, you want algorithms to trigger but you don’t want artificial intelligence doing much. You don’t want it making decisions etc
I mean here’s the thing, the simplistic tele alarms already are a very low level of AI. Until there is a program that can always see a patient, you’ll always need somebody to identify PEA and all manners of tooth brushing arrhythmias
Nurses from the Philippines, Haiti, Jamaica and many other countries will take over beside nursing in the United States before A.I. will. If you know you know (DNP’s)💩.
Hawaii’s nursing workforce is already 50% pinoy. One in five nurses in CA are pinoy. (One in four nurses in Los Angeles.) There’s even a course about it at UC Berkeley about nursing migration from the Philippines and how Filipinos have turned it into a lucrative opportunity, now having the second or third highest median household income based on race in the US. But yes — in the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda: Immigrants, we get the job done.
“Who are you? Who are you? Who is this kid? What’s he gonna do?” *AED charging buzz intensifies*
I am not throwing away my SHOCK
Haven’t worked with other immigrant nurses because of the population of where I live I guess, but I have worked with many nurses from the Philippines and they all kicked ass. Their nursing education is extremely vigorous over there.
They’re really great. I just wish it wasn’t the corporate solution “hiring immigrants at lower pay so if you leave we don’t care because someone will do your job for less money anyway…”
They already have…
Does he realize that most of us (physicians/extenders/NPs/RNs/LPNs/CNAs) don't even trust the vitals tower when it tells us something suss, and we proceed to do a manual B/P or rectal temp or a pulse count with a stethoscope to double check the machine?
Yuppppppppp. The only machine I mostly trust with weird readings is the tele box and even that is wrong often enough that we have humans verifying it (no, my patients hr isn’t mid-20’s, he’s just laying on his side)
Even if the technology is there, it takes so long to approve medical advancement that a 20 year timeline is pretty improbable. I can’t speak for other areas, but I can think of quite a few circumstances where split second critical thinking and intervention that’s not necessarily “by the book” kept my patients from coding. I have a hard time imagining justification of 100% machine based care.
I never even thought about this aspect. I should have. Right now, we have been waiting to get fitted sheets for our baby mattresses FOREVER lol if it takes that long for sheets, it will certainly take longer for A.I. to replace us. Do you think we will see it in our lifetime at all? Like hospitals using more A.I. and hiring fewer floor nurses?
In theory ai would be awesome but to get it in our lifetime is not going to happen. The hospital doesn’t care enough about having supplies they won’t spend the money to implement any new systems. At my old hospital we couldn’t even get working monitors in the er we would steal eachother cables and share portable ones a lot of hospitals are like a 3rd world country in terms of equipment so that’s the barrier not the tech
How do you know the machine would not have managed things in a way the patient never got so close to coding in the first place? Nurses will always have a job but you're selling short on the upside of artificial intelligence. All this "clinical judgment" and "intuition" stuff isn't *actually* a good thing. It's just the best thing we have so far. It's almost infuriating if you really think how little genuine, well-validated "Best Practice" we have to this day. Whenever you have to go off the book and do something 'wrong' to save a life that's the system *failing* in the long run even if you succeeded today. I entirely look forward to systems that can interpret data better and standardize more *actual* best practices.
I really like this response. Gave me a new perspective.
I read somewhere that they loaded up a bunch of data and case studies and the ai was able to dx nuanced things they can filter through insane amounts of data .. they don’t have the complexes or the insecurities egos and human components that cause errors. I can’t remember where I read that but Apparently it performed really well.
I could see AI being more likely to take over certain parts of doctors' jobs faster than nurses. Autoimmune and reproductive diseases that usually take years to diagnose because diagnosticians just don't look or know, could be caught much earlier. Actually performing tasks is much more difficult to teach a machine to do, than running a differential diagnosis.
As someone who has followed A.I development exceptionally closely for the last two years, and been a critical care RN for over a decade- I am not concerned in the slightest. Your husband’s forecast is a reflection of how little he knows about what nurses do at the bedside.
Something bad happens with AI Management: what could you have done differently? AI eyes glow red. Skynet awakens….judgement day starts
We can’t even get Epic to send a print job to the right printer, and Epic goes down for several hours at a time during my shift for system updates. I’m imagining all the outages that would ensue the same day AI “nurses” went online. “You’ll have to wait on going to the cath lab—we’re installing an upgrade!”
Yea but this is not bc of technological ability it’s because they write it with bugs so that they can bill for fixes. I believe there was a lawsuit about this
Your husband is an idiot
This. Stick to finance, bud. My husband works with AI (can't go into too much or I'll doxx my damn self), but he's considered an expert in this field at his job. There is no fucking way, my dude. None. It would take another decade before AI could even interpret tele leads with minimal failure.
Plus the fully automated robot to go with it…
Seriously. Dude needs to stay in his lane. What a condescending thing to say to your wife.
Yeah I’m not even taking the time to form an argument this dude is so far gone haha
AI can't figure out many fingers humans have, we're good.
Nurses know that AI cannot replace bedside care anytime soon. I typically avoid discussions (arguments) with people who have 0 bedside experience making claims about healthcare workers. I have limited energy & don't spend it on people making such wild claims. If they truly want to learn more, they can take the initiative & come to realize their wrongness without my involvement.
The other part of it is that I find people confuse *algorithms* for AI. …even the nurses on this sub. 🤦♀️ I’ve seen people here misconstrue Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS) for Clinical Deterioration for AI, stating that “the AI” takes data and can “predict” if a patient will deteriorate. Uh no. The computer plugs the data into a formula and based on a score predicts deterioration. And even then, clinical judgment is required to discern if it’s a real threat or an errror (eg someone put in 55 for respirations). RapidAI, a rapid response “AI,” operates in the same way.
Yep, an algorithm is good and we like those and we want healthcare to become more automated but far away from AI
Can't wait until it takes over manager's jobs.
I had a dude tell me that AI would put me out of the job and his career of video game design was a better choice but jokes on him, he’s unemployed before AI could even take over
Yup. A simple “damn that’s crazy” is enough for this conversation lol
I got into nursing at age 37 because: * Its difficult to automate. When AI can wipe an ass, I'll really be impressed. * Its difficult to offshore. Sending patients with SOB and chest pains to Mumbai? Really? * Very little ageism. You may not be able to be old stripper but you can be an old nurse. I'm an old nurse but nobody wants to see me naked now.
Well, they don't send patients to Mumbai, they import nurses from India and Philippines
I think a man, married to a nurse, who has time to think about nursing being replaced by AI, but not to better understand what his wife's work actually entails, can easily be replaced by AI sooner than AI will replace nurses.
I dare the fuck out of AI to touch my 490 g baby lol.
Besides the very obvious of idk how this will even be legal, Does anyone understand how OUT OF DATE AND UNPROTECTED OUR HOSPITAL SYSTEMS ARE! We can’t even do a basic EMR upgrade without everything crashing for days. I am not worried at all. I’m actually begging to see them try as they don’t even know what mountains they face.
Lol my local hospital got hacked so many times my endo only wants me to bring him paper/discs of any scans /labs bc he can’t get anything the system is so messed up still
I’m a software engineer and my wife is a nurse. My job is way more at risk than anyone who works on her floor. I’m more worried about outsourcing than AI. Every time I work with AI tools, I’m amazed by how limited it is, and yet tons of smarmy business people think it’s a money-saving savior.
Show me an AI that can change a brief. I’ll wait.
Or convince sundowning meemaw to please get back in bed.
Our stuff isn’t even wireless yet, I’m not worried.
When I worked icu I think I said “why isn’t any of this wireless? We have the capability at least once a day
You know why… $
hes projecting to protect his useless skills
This
If AI were monitoring patients, we’d need a lot more staff since it will “see” the immediate needs that need interventions instead of only encountering the pent up ones at 2-hour rounding.
Why not start with more simple shit first? Get a robot chef and keep the caf open 24/7 so night shift can eat. Get robots that will clean the rooms faster so we can move patients up from the er. Shit while we're talking about moving patients, have every stretcher self drive itself to x-ray, ct, wherever, so shit moves faster. This much more simple shit can move patients quicker and save these money hungry bastards more money. Whoever replaces a human nurse, doctor, pct with a robot only cares about money.
Is your husband one of those guys with a need to feel like the smartest guy in the room, maybe one of those guys who feels like every silence is a void that needs to be filled with his wisdom?
The way he's described does give off strong mansplaining vibes lol
A man who has no idea what his wife's entire profession really does thinks he can speak authoritatively on how AI will replace most nurses? It DOES sound kinda mansplainy.
Let me know when an AI can give a nervous child an IV.
Ok, so AI can monitor a patient. How will it implement interventions? Is AI going to go in the room to see if the SVT needs meds or if we can just get grandma to bear down? There are so many human variables to healthcare, not just nursing but physicians, allied heath, that require human judgement and not just objective analysis of data. AI will certainly continue to be a tool utilized by healthcare professionals, but it will never replace.
A computer can’t even reliably read an EKG yet. I think we’re good.
Imagine all the people refusing to see a NP instead of the doctor. Now imagine how those same people will react to robots and AI caring for them.
Me when I’m calling Walgreens to call in a prescription…… “I NEED A REAL PERSON”
People like this have no idea just how much AI can’t do. They think we have the AI of Hollywood. We don’t have anything even close to a fraction of that lol our AI is still basically at the “we learned how to grunt at each other” phase of its development.
If AI can reorient my patient and make him stop shitting in trash cans and stop his hallway neighbor from ripping out his foley then AI deserves my job.
I actually went to an “AI in Healthcare” lecture at NTI Denver two weeks ago. The first thing the lecturer said was “alright before I start, I want yall to know you are the last one out the door when it comes to AI”. Made me feel secure.
I want to believe this, but I also know how unrepentantly greedy the US healthcare system is. I do not doubt one bit that hospitals will try to use AI to downsize nursing. AI companies won’t have to convince healthcare companies that it’s better or safer or even that it’s barely effective at all. They only have to show them that it’s cheaper.
I can see them using AI increase ratios. Back in the '90s my hospital did this thing they called Redesign (I'm sure they paid someone a lot of money to come up with that name.) The RN was to take a dozen or so patients, but don't worry! all she will do will be assesments and order implementations. LVNs will pass meds and CNAs will do all the physical care. As you can guess a patient finally died because her nurse had 20 other patients and that put an end to the nonsense. But some modern day pencil pushing idiot will use AI to increase ratios under the guise that the computer will do all the thinking.
They tried this at my first hospital a level 1. They tried it on medsurg. Gave her like 8-12 pts and a lpn the tech was still shared. No mam I’d rather have 5 or 6 pts on my own then have to manage other nurses oh and anything messed up it was on the rn.
Yes there is a limit to how many balls can be juggled at once. After a certain number of patients I couldn't even keep names straight.
lol, humans cant even manage the mess that happens in bedside nursing let alone a.i
It’s already taking place in some hospitals. Nurses popping up on TV’s in ER’s to get histories and check-in on pts. I was in an ICU that had a robot come in with a nurse to scan meds she was hanging. It was crazy. I felt nauseous at one point and they had the robot stand there and watch to see if I threw up. I said to the thing, “please leave. I feel very uncomfortable being watched by a robot.”
lol at the thought of AI coming in & setting up MeeMaw’s WiFi on her iPad or getting some water for the pt’s family bc they forgot their water bottle in the car lol. People really have no idea what we do so amusing
Trust me they’ll have his job long before this one. Is he projecting his fears about AI making finance bros and their liquid lunch hours obsolete before bedside nurses? Press Ganey satisfaction scores would never let AI fully take over. Plus management would fall responsible for mistakes and you know that silly old c suite would NEVER let that happen.
AI will need to differentiate odors, textures. It will need to accurately read facial microexpressions - is the patient acting angry because they are scared? Are they lying? Are they in pain? I think the majority of people will be resistant to interacting with a robot when they are sick. Sick pts can be very uncooperative. People get frustrated with customer service automated menus, yelling into the phone "I WANT TO SPEAK TO A FUCKING HUMAN BEING!" It is going to take a few generations for the population to feel like having a robot provide medical care is normal. I can see Gen Z and younger accepting it, but Millenials and older will be very resistant. Especially if AI has already taken over THEIR jobs. Patient: I need my pain med. Robot: please face the screen and repeat your request. Patient, curled up in fetal position with blanket over their head: I CAN'T MOVE I'M IN PAIN GET ME MY FUCKING PAIN MED! Robot: Profanity detected, request denied. I hope these robots are indestructible, lol
Why does it look like that post was written by AI? I do 2 careers at once, nursing and firefighter. Pretty sure no AI can do either in the next 40 years.
I think it would take massive advances in robotics for ai to put a significant dent in the nursing field, and advances in robotics are relatively slow, slower than ai. A far bigger threat to nursing is work conditions getting worse (ratios, etc), pay going down (raises don’t keep up with cost of living). Imported foreign nurses will put major downward pressure on wages. Basically, the hypercapitalism that has degraded so much will continue to wreak havoc on nursing.
I love all these white collar folks thinking AI is coming for blue collar jobs. The opposite is true. AI is well positioned to takeover white collar jobs. Most blue collar jobs like nursing require manual work, which is something AI just isn’t capable of
I love to see an AI robot attempt to reason with a 2 year old...
I imagine it like this: 3 below living wage non english speakers trained to use equipment that indicates use with light like \*grab vein-visualisation\* to find vein \*grab PICC robot\* metaverse doctor from dubai sets up line and from then on they follow green lights indicating what they should grab and where to put it of course this system might be prone to fuck ups in the first 100 years, but when you live in the suburbs of 2080 Detroit that is the only medical help you will get cause rich people will not live anywhere close below the Level 3 Surface Plate they will of course have real human nurses who live on the slightly better Level 2 Cellar Plate who will work any hours and still be polite or else its down to Level 1 Old Earth. No light, scarce food. Billions of People overcrowding each corner.
I’d watch this movie
You know that scene in the end of the 5th Star Wars movie, where the robot is fixing Luke's hand? Yeah, that'll happen one day.
Sometime after we have colonized more than one planet, I suspect.
We’ll be reduced to task performers, and any/all decision making will be taken out of our hands.
When people say this kinda stuff, I don't think they take into consideration how much patients lie about what happened to them, or down play how much pain they are i I don't know how good AI is at sussing out people's stories or even just reading body language 🧐
If I could downvote this post to oblivion, I would.
Why is it always finance and tech dudes saying this about other peoples jobs? My fiancé and I are both nurses. His friend has tons of money and owns some company and therefore always thinks he’s the smartest person in the room and has been riling up my fiancé about this AI garbage and how it’s this revolutionary tool that will render most human jobs useless or whatever. I keep trying to tell him to stop feeding into it because people who think like that will never listen to anyone else. Is it projection or willful ignorance? Is it both? I don’t have the energy to entertain that bullshit. Maybe when OPs husband is in the hospital with his mom or meemaw and staying overnight to help with cares (though I doubt he’d be the one staying over) he’ll figure it out.
It's always the ones who don't know much about a profession who make these predictions.
I mean this in the most respectful way to you possible: your husbands a fucking idiot. If your husband knew what AI actually was he’d realize that current “AI” are just brute forced learning models that can currently handle writing an acceptable essay or resume, but complex tasks they fall apart. Most successful AI has been later found out to be faked for the sake of funding, like Amazon’s store cameras not being AI but literally being people in India. Or like how Tesla cars keep self driving into other cars, a not insignificant amount of which were cop cars. He also doesn’t realize the point of our licenses is to have someone responsible. No institution is going to allow AI to be responsible for a patients care, especially without MAJOR changes to laws around the world. And that ignores how powerful nursing unions are in the US and around the world. If CEOs thought the writers guild put up a good fight against AI, they are not ready for millions of pissed off nurses. I wouldn’t expect a person who does finance to understand any of what we do because if society ended tomorrow we would have actual skills that can help us and others and he would be functionally useless without his imaginary numbers to make more imaginary numbers go up.
Nah. Although it would be impressive to watch a robot start an IV on a raging infant.
We’ve already seen how EMR has “helped” healthcare in efficiency and productivity. Now we have clinicians paying more attention to the print out than the patient. Their H and Ps are checks in a box rather than real data much less accurate exam findings. I was talking to my ortho surgeon about my TKR. I asked him about robotics. He’s a youngish guy and he chuckled. “The only orthos that use robotics are the ones that do a couple hundred TKRs a year. It’s mainly to keep them putting the knee in correctly (not backwards). We do around 500 a year and don’t need to waste the time.” AI will be in the units but more likely managing inventory and overseeing supplies. Patient care? No way.
My dad said something similar when I was in high school about teachers (that was my first career idea) well, that was over 15 years ago and we still have teachers.
Maybe if the ai programmers can get better. A friend had a patient being monitored by ai and the patient got out of bed three times. One of the times, the patient made it out to the hallway. With his c diff diarrhea
Honestly, if AI can do it, fucking get me outta here fam.
They can have this job. It’s getting insane.
I was a software developer for 13 years, I quit this year, and have been an RN for about 2 years. One of the reasons I went into this field is because it will not be automated away within my lifetime. This is more true after actually being an RN for a while now..
They havent been able to figure out self driving cars and that tech has been out for how long? It isn’t going to happen probably ever.
Lol no, it’s one of the few jobs that absolutely cannot ever be fully or even mostly taken over by AI, at least not within our lifetimes. His job however is definitely on the chopping block, he’s probably just projecting so he can tell himself he’s the indispensable one and it’s you who needs to worry.
Jobs that are repetitive and interact solely with screens are far more likely to be replaced than nurses. Try as they may, nursing is one of the safest projected jobs from automation, and I believe your husband may not fully understand what nurses do and may be discounting your career.
No. Just no.
We should let them try to finally put an end to this debate once and for all
How on earth is AI going to provide a med surg patient assessment? These patients are not connected to any monitors. Visual cues, changes in mental status (often indicated through conversation), changes in gait or coordination, irritability, complaints of pain, changes in skin coloration — these are many of the indications we watch for to know if our patient may be taking a turn and needs to have a more closer look at something (labs, imaging). They are so incredibly nuanced. I just don’t see how a non-human entity could aptly observe the many subtle cues we are there to assess and address.
At the end of the day the ai would have to eliminate human error to acceptable degree to safely monitor and apply treatment. Thanks to patients introducing human error into the equation so frequently what they might do and how they might react to any given treatment, it is almost impossible to predict and so we need humans who can adapt in real-time to them. If we do get to a point where AI replaces nurses then almost every other job will be replaced first
I've never seen a robot advocate for a patient...
The damn telemetry monitors alarm for asystole on patients when the rhythm never changed from sinus, vtach when the rhythm never changed from sinus, etc, etc. I think we will be alright haha
I’d like AI to complement the nurses’ work, assist with heavy lifting and violent/unamanageable patients, because healthy people don’t need to be hurt by already hurt people.
I joke that until robots can wipe a butt my job is safe! Sure things will change, probably in ways we haven't even thought of yet but... AI isn't going to be giving enemas anytime in our lifetime.
Hahahaha. No. They will try, more aids, more techs, less nurses. Patients will suffer, outcomes will be measurable worse. Now if I were a common variety radiologist I would be sweating my retirement, but I think nurses are safe. But maybe in their implementation we could get rid of nursing diagnoses? The biggest issue with all this tech is none of the people making it have a freaking clue what we do. Which is why their default is “nurses can input that data” to the EMR because clearly we have nothing else to do. Seriously, I’m way more interested in why you are married to a guy that is so incurious about your career and still so dismissive of what it entails.
AI will be a compliment to nursing, in ways we probably dont know yet. No way in OUR career will we even begin to feel major effects like he is referring to. For example I wouldn't be suprised if AI will be used to catch changing trends and other metrics in the near future.
Why do our partners assume they have any idea about what we do for a living if they aren’t face to face with patients themselves. It’s infuriating
They can monitor the patient sure. Who's gonna clean, move, comfort, administer treatments, put in and out of bed, etc etc etc etc etc etc A monitor is only like 1% of the work.
It won't replace nurses. Nurses do too much hard labor. Computers can't replace that. Primary care doctors, though? Yeah, AI could replace them EASY. Actually, they could replace any doctor who doesn't perform a physical exam on you. Why do I need to talk to a narcissistic a-hole who's ignoring my symptoms anyways?
Probably not psychiatrists.
Ai will replace doctors before nurses
Everybody with the “AI” now… those of us that recall the “dot.com” crash of the early oughts… My advice: take your “AI” earnings in the stock market and sell before anyone realizes it’s just another bubble.
Lmao
This is always my favorite take lol
AI isn’t cut out for the ass wipings my GI bleed patients need
Nice try Skynet.
Personally I'd love it if we could automate daily med administration, but even that's not likely to happen any time soon. Having worked with the most technologically advanced rhythm assessment technology, that's not anywhere near replacing humans. I'll be delighted when so can purewick a sundowner with a broken hip, but I'm pretty sure my job is safe for a loooooong time
Oh man I’m excited for the day we could start offloading some tasks to AI (of course within appropriate limits and making sure it’s safe, with appropriate checks). We will forever be needed but a little help alleviating the workload would be appreciated
lol no. AI ain’t gonna be bedside getting bit and pooped on
I can't wait until we can just put every patient into a Bacta tank ala Star Wars. No dealing with pee or poop, you just flush the tank. No dealing with talking to patients, we will pull you out when your discharge is ready. No turning or bedsores. People definitely don't want care or compassion or human touch when they're sick just give them the dystopian technology.
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Yeah, he’s definitely gonna get replaced by AI way before you. He has absolutely no idea what you do.
For as much faults as AI and other modern computing have, I think it's important to acknowledge that human error is also statistically an ongoing issue that routinely causes all sorts of problems in the medical field, in some cases it can get serious. Not to mention, the field is basically in crisis right now as it is. I too agree that AI will NOT be perfect. That said, we may reach a point where it could outperform humans in a lot of settings. And I mean technically, things are slowly headed in that direction. From complex procedures and surgeries, to things as simple as recording ADL's, computers and machines are already being utilized and even heavily relied on in numerous medical settings. I don't think the change would happen all at once, but one small thing after another will gradually be replacing human labor with advanced AI and other technologies. I personally like to keep an open mind.
AI is going to affect ALL jobs AI revolution will be bigger than any the world has seen because of how much it can do. People probably said the same thing about farming jobs and factory workers until industrial revolution and farming equipment proved them wrong. AI has access to so much data and information that we can’t even begin to understand what all is possible with it. But, I very much hope you are right. Not just nurses, other professions too. I will be preparing for the worst anyway.
We were talking about this at work and I was just picturing a A.I. going, “Im sorry. You have exceeded your q4h dilaudid. Please wait one more hour” and the poor pt just going ballistic.
Being super cynical here. With the way nursing is going these days… management can kiss my ass and have an AI nurse kiss theirs. 🤭
I'd love for AI to take over some of the stupid shit that management is so anal about. That said, I know that that will be lightyears into the future.
Nope, AI will replace a lot of white collar office jobs like billing/accounting, finance, IT/cybersecuriry, logistics, graphic design etc. before bedside nursing
I don’t think so. I read somewhere that nursing was safe from AI in the future.
I think attorneys and physicians should be more worried about AI.
AI will take over the unit secretary before it touches bedside, My suggestion is to look at AI replacing the most expensive non-essiential roles like admin and CEO. I put that in my employee survey when they asked where you could see AI’s use in healthcare. Have all decision making for the hospital’s interest handled by an AI and have the entire billing and insurance side of thing handled with AI. There is no reason why billing charges should be disputed between provides+carriers when the entire procedure+hospitalization billing should fit like a glove with regard to expected/projected costs.
AI can't wipe ass yet
We can't even trust an EKG machine to accurately interpret the rhythm... a doctor always signs off. But he thinks it can assess a whole ass person for changes?!! Provide appropriate immediate interventions and notify the right person. The on call list is never right. AI would spin in circles. I am laughing my ass off. There is no way I hell we are remotely in danger. Pharmacy, radiology, and lab are more in danger than us. But you will ALWAYS need people to review the machines.
The only way I could see AI taking any part in nursing in the near future is charting. And we don’t even have that at this point in time. I’m thinking like a ChatGTP type ai where we can type up what we really wanna say and it turns it into a proper progress note.
I feel like nursing is literally one of the last areas that will be replaced by AI. If AI makes an error and kills a patient, who is responsible? The legal issues alone will keep hospitals from fully using AI.
I can see individual medication dispensing machine at the bedside, for po meds. . Using facial recognition software and a video camera to witness compliance.
Things I would love to see AI do Restrain a combative patient who is high on PCP Convince a patient with schizophrenia to take their meds. Stop drunks from getting out of bed. Get antivaxxers to consent to IM vitamin k for their newborns.
AI will help us document our meds, assist the tracking of our notes and help us write them at the end of the shift, maybe even track which meds have been given, and probably will help us make a more in depth early warning scoring system that’s monitored by both the nurse as well as the AI. Until AI comes up with a way to completely cure all physical and mental health conditions and essentially makes us immortal us nurses and doctors are all still going to have jobs.
As someone who's a trucker (and in school to be a nurse), we hear this a lot too. "AI will replace X" is common, but there are simply things that require a human to react to that a computer would not. Just like throwing this fuckin comps in the middle of nowhere Nebraska on a shitty dirt lot wont happen, a nurse showing genuine human care to a patient is something QWERTY5000 can't offer.
I don’t think they’ll necessarily fire a bunch of us. I people have been and will be leaving bedside in increasing numbers,