A most excellent article - only exceeded in good taste, decorum and sheer Brad Pitt like looks by me ;-)

What the author does not touch on is the middle ground between expensive-per-hour human warmth Doctors and cold analytical Machines.

That middle ground is Nurses, Pharmicists, Pathologists and similar medical Technicians who can more cheaply talk to the Patient and do most front end identification and keying in of the data.

The Doctor with his/her encyclopedic like knowledge is thereby replaced by a lower paid, more plentiful Technician-Machine combination, which also has that encyclopedic like knowledge.

This may also eliminate "time and money wasting" by those who just want to talk to the Doctor once or twice a week and to receive a bottle of Pills that is almost mutually understood to be a Placebo.

Wow plantagenet, can I have the name of that doctor. I've personally found a couple who can stitch up a cut, [although vets are generally better at that], but I've yet to find one who can diagnose anything more than a headache. My last one kept taking me off cardiologist prescribed medication, precipitating 2 heart attacks I really did not need.

Todays doctors are pretty useless without their diagnostic machines, so let's not bother with the middle man, & go straight to the machine.

Gosh, Hasbeen, I agree with you. I've lived in this area for thirty years and the average time a doctor remains in a practice is about a year. I've not yet met one who was interested in me or anything about my reasons for visiting him. None knew anything that I didn't know, and all relied on my self diagnosis, rapidly filling out whatever prescription i requested, relieved to have a patient who took up only five of the fifteen allotted minutes. As for Mr king's desire to have: " a human to talk to, to relate with and who will tell me they have my best interests at heart. I want a confessor and a clinician." I wouldn't like to confess anything to any of the thirty or more doctors I've visited - always for minor problems, thank goodness. I'd welcome an intelligent machine, except I wouldn't like the fact that it would be connected to every other computer and government department in the land, and my physical and mental secrets would be available to whoever was interested for ever and ever.

As a medical practitioner with a very deep involvement in information technology over my career I both agree and disagree with Vinod Khosla. Algorithms will play a much larger role in helping future doctors make better faster decisions. To do so we need both the people who design the algorithms and those who use them to better understand each others roles.
If a doctor can be replaced by an algorithm then they should be, same as if a doctor can be replaced by a nurse, or other health professional. What we need to do is up skill our providers to embrace big data, analytics, and new technologies to enhance their capabilities.
The key to this is education and collaboration across the groups involved to develop solutions aimed at improving the patient experience and outcomes.