“They didn’t lick it off the stones” was the expression my mother would have used. In many of those pictures of students graduating this summer, you will see a mother or father or other relative who was the inspiration for this graduating scion. Which brings me to the parents and grandparents. How will we explain the carelessness involved, the sheer lack of foresight involved in voting for people like the Healy-Raes?Įven if we hadn’t destroyed the world, we have failed to pass on wealth to a new generation who will struggle to find suitable accommodation – a perennial task for peripatetic hospital doctors – along with the lifestyle their parents enjoyed. They will not remember our generation kindly, and we can hardly blame them. Politicians have for years pandered to every group except for one – the non-voting children who will live in this future we’ve created. We have left behind a polluted world, and are still destroying huge tracts of nature and rainforest that will add to the climate catastrophe. But we do know we are cheating the younger generation. The sad fact is that we can’t know tomorrow and what it brings. We are likely to see increases in population – both here, and generally across Europe – as other countries become more uninhabitable.īut equally, we might return to space, and through that travel realise how tiny, how utterly unimportant we are in this universe of universes. The Irish government can sluff off the impositions that the EU has put on our emissions for a while, but as soon as the fines for not meeting our targets begin to kick in, we can truly say we are living in the era of climate change, and we will be living in it from that point on until the end of humanity.Įvery decision, every protocol, every strategic move contemplated by government (and therefore every institution and business) will have to take into account the effect on climate change. Some diseases – notably cancer – will not be the major cause of death it is today (or certainly that it was in the past) while other diseases – and particularly pandemics – rise in incidence and rates of mortality.Ĭlimate change will affect both the lives of these students, the type of medicine they practice, and where they practice it. Wait until someone issues the command: “Please create for me a political campaign representing far-right, anti-foreigner views that isn’t quite as stupid or as ludicrous as the ones we’ve seen in Ireland so far.”Īnd yet, no matter what happens with AI – good or bad – those students will face a different world of disease and ill-health. We’ve had this problem before in one or two cases – so imagine what happens when such people are gifted the tools to improve upon their fraud?Īnd training and education is only the start of it. It’s going to be harder to spot the fraudsters that seem like plausible doctors, but who have, in fact, AI’d their way through college and training, and are not up to the standards required. (And is in demand across the world precisely because of that rigor). And we trust and depend on the hope that these foreign students received the good education and rigorous training that is demanded here. We depend on these doctors to provide the manpower that somehow our SIX medical schools cannot provide, as those ex-students are now busy sunning themselves on Bondi Beach. It will be interesting to see how well Ireland keeps up with this technology in terms of educating doctors, but it creates another even more serious problem in judging the qualifications of non-Irish educated doctors. AI will bring many benefits, we all suppose, but it will also bring radical change and the destruction of many modes of teaching – as surely as the looms of the early nineteenth century did to home weaving. ![]() Indeed, the graduates who qualify in the next few weeks will be the last – or very close to the last group – who were trained in what we will call the pre-AI era. The world in which they will practice medicine will be a fundamentally different one to the one we know now – a world where machines routinely do medical work that is currently done by doctors and surgeons, and where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely used for a range of tasks. ![]() This is one of the most joyful times of the year in medicine when shiny, happy people appear in the courtyards of our universities – and subsequently in the pages of Irish Medical Times – clutching degrees, parents, and sometimes fellow students, one last time before entering the adult world.
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