How dentists, running coaches and restaurants are using AI - SMH

TEXT START: Dentist Sen Le says he is not afraid of losing his job to AI: a technology he has helped to develop, and one which he says can detect problems in a patient’s mouth that most human dentists would miss.

The Dissection

The article converts early automation into a reassurance narrative. It shows AI performing diagnosis, data analysis, rostering, marketing, and decision support, then treats the continued presence of a human professional as evidence that the profession is safe.

Its real function is to normalize AI as an assistant while preserving the identity, status, and legitimacy of existing workers. The examples are carefully selected around physical contact, empathy, lived experience, and accountability—human attributes presented as permanent barriers rather than temporary advantages.

The article documents productivity gains that can eventually reduce the amount of human labor required per patient, athlete, or restaurant transaction. It then describes those gains as job protection.

The Core Fallacy

The central error is confusing “AI does not replace the entire occupation immediately” with “AI cannot destroy the occupation’s economic necessity.”

Dentists, coaches, and restaurant managers may remain in the loop while the system requires fewer of them, pays them less, or concentrates the valuable work in a smaller number of AI-augmented operators. Human oversight, empathy, physical presence, and liability are lag defenses. They slow substitution; they do not defeat it.

The article also assumes that increased demand will absorb productivity gains. That is possible during expansion, but it is not a structural guarantee. Once AI lowers the cost and raises the consistency of service, competitive pressure rewards firms that reduce labor input or increase output without proportionally increasing headcount.

Hidden Assumptions

• Human oversight will remain intensive rather than becoming nominal, standardized, or delegated to cheaper workers.
• Legal responsibility will require highly trained professionals rather than merely a human sign-off layer.
• Patients and customers will continue paying a premium for human involvement after AI makes comparable results widely available.
• Empathy and lived experience cannot be simulated or operationalized well enough to compete with human providers.
• Rising participation in running, healthcare, or dining will permanently outpace productivity-driven labor reduction.
• AI will remain an assistant instead of absorbing the feedback loops, judgment, communication, and coordination now used to justify the human role.
• Productivity gains will be shared with workers rather than captured by owners through lower labor costs, higher throughput, or tighter performance expectations.
• Regulation will preserve professional bottlenecks instead of merely preserving accountability while automating most underlying work.

Social Function

Primarily transition management and ideological anesthetic, with a substantial partial truth component.

The partial truth is that AI is currently augmenting these professions rather than eliminating every human role at once. The anesthetic is the leap from that transitional condition to permanent human indispensability. The article gives workers a vocabulary for accepting automation without confronting its cumulative effect: each “assistant” removes tasks, compresses expertise, expands the span of one operator, and makes fewer operators economically necessary.

The Verdict

This is a soft-landing article about the opening phase of productive participation collapse. It accurately records AI entering hands-on professions, but mistakes the persistence of human-facing roles for the survival of mass human economic necessity.

The dentists, coaches, and restaurant operators are not disproving obsolescence. They are demonstrating the transition: AI takes the cognitive and administrative substrate first, while humans remain temporarily attached to the physical, emotional, legal, and social surface. That surface is a moat, but it is also a shrinking perimeter. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, the article is evidence for automation’s advance disguised as evidence of human security.