NYT article “Review: ‘The Digital Doctor’ by Robert Wachter Weighs Medicine’s Technological Transformation” reminds us that we are facing a different kind of risk when instructions are computer generated. The risk we were facing or dealing in the past decade has evolved. Now, the real risk is human obedient to machine output! This example show machine to human interfaces are obstacles for human-to-human collaborations.
Imagine if the number of pills were hand-written, will the nurse enquired about the abnormal large amount? Computer screen and print-outs seems embedded with some magical power. Maybe people are not confident to challenge a computer. They are trained to trust it!
extract:
“The other big problem behind the overdose was more cultural, and even harder to solve. In a setting in which all exchanges are digital, informal chat (“Do you believe the dose they just ordered?”) tends to vanish. Instead, everyone sits at an individual monitor, immersed in an individual digital world, tuning out the beeps.”
