What does the short film The Instant Doctor question about replacing doctors with AI?

Whether an AI that only issues prescriptions removes the doctor's duty of care that goes beyond them (listening, empathy, comfort), and whether such "fast-food medicine" serves the patient's actual well-being or just restores people's ability to work as quickly as possible.

The six-minute film shows a future in which a machine "Instant Doctor" diagnoses and prescribes in seconds. Two questions follow from it:

• The duty to listen. A human doctor fulfils a duty of care that goes beyond writing prescriptions: empathy, listening, consolation. The Instant Doctor eliminates that duty for the sake of efficiency. What long-term costs arise for society if the medical need to listen is removed from the system?
• Medicine as fast food. Quick, standardised and cheap, like fast food. Whose interest does that model serve: the patient's well-being, or the stability of the labour market by getting people back to work fast?

The film links to the principle of beneficence: doing good for a patient is more than fixing a symptom.

Go deeper:

• DUST: Instant Doctor (sci-fi short film) — the six-minute film itself.