This falls exactly under the same type of news as:
1905: new "automobile" is slower than a good old horse!
Mature technologies or practices will always have an edge when new alternatives come, but mature techs dont improve much while the new ones can only go up. Robots will become faster, be more autonomous, etc and should drive down costs down the road. Just like digital photography started by being much worse than film back in the 90s, while beating its performance in most metrics in 2010s.
Not quite: transportation has always been developed with speed in mind. The Benz No.1 was a lightweight phaeton, not a roadgoing tractor.
This is quite the opposite of how medical procedures are developed with regard to cost: there, optimizing for cost is almost considered bad taste, "you can't put a price on a human life" and all that. Of course everybody knows that a less expensive procedure would help more people than a more expensive one, but the whole environment makes it very easy to not think too hard about cost.
High cost of high tech medicine is in no way comparable to the relatively slow beginning of cars.
> but the whole environment makes it very easy to not think too hard about cost.
I think the opposite is happening right now. These days the FDA requires a bunch of health outcome metrics to show that your drug makes more financial sense than your competitors' (patient benefit vs the price you are asking for) so there is definitely more cost pressure than there ever was. Let's not forget also that most countries' social security systems around the globe are completely broke so there will be sooner or later a cost realization.
> High cost of high tech medicine is in no way comparable to the relatively slow beginning of cars.
The first cars were not cheap, almost nobody could afford them. We had to wait for Ford and the T model to see cars that regular folks could afford to buy. So in terms of analogy, it's not completely wrong: cars were worse in many regards, and way more expensive than traditional means of transportation at the time.
1905: new "automobile" is slower than a good old horse!
Mature technologies or practices will always have an edge when new alternatives come, but mature techs dont improve much while the new ones can only go up. Robots will become faster, be more autonomous, etc and should drive down costs down the road. Just like digital photography started by being much worse than film back in the 90s, while beating its performance in most metrics in 2010s.