We are, of course, in the middle of a possible Obamacare recall, and the subject of health insurance is in everyone’s minds. It struck me the other day that we wouldn’t really need health insurance if medical care was simply cheap. I mean really, really cheap. Like, what if cancer drugs were 20 bucks for a six month supply? What if eye surgery was 150$?

Is such a thing possible? Beats me; I basically made those numbers up. But it does strike me that in this age of automation and AI, as well as easy distribution of information, there must be ways to drive the cost of medicine down. I keep hearing about robotic surgery, for example. Could we use deep learning technology to enable robot surgeons to learn from each surgery they perform thereby becoming better and better surgeons. As a result, training a new surgeon would not be a matter of pushing some human through eight years of school, but simply copying a program. (I’m aware it’s more complicated than I make it seem, but I don’t think the idea is crazy.) Could we at least have this as an option, so that a doctor could say, “we need to cut your tumor out. You can pay this human surgeon 100 grand to do it, or use the robo-doc for 10 grand. (Again, I’m making these numbers up.)

And let’s consider drugs. Drugs are expensive. I started wondering how hard it is to reverse engineer drugs these days. Not hard, it turns out. What’s stopping people from reverse engineering any drug and putting the recipe online (probably on the “dark web”), allowing people to mix their own versions? Well, mainly that it’s illegal. But if I had to chose between no medicine and illegal medicine I’d chose the latter.

I’m aware that there are numerous ethical and philosophical dilemmas with what I’m proposing here. I’m mainly wondering, “could this happen? Will it happen?”

It many ways this all ties in with the transhumanist movement. Transhumanism is about hacking technology (computer and biological) to improve health humans. I see no reason it can’t be done to improve sick humans.