It just makes sense, he argued. As bank tellers have been by ATMs and cashiers have been by automatic checkout kiosks, "certain doctors' livelihoods will be affected by these new machines. As computers get better, we'll need fewer humans across a range of specialties."

In other words: "If you do a single thing – and especially if there's a lot of money in that single thing – you should put a 'Welcome, Robots!' doormat outside your office," Manjoo wrote. "They're coming for you."

Kent Bottles, MD, senior fellow at the Thomas Jefferson University School of Population Health and chief medical officer at Verilogue's CareCoach.com, isn't worried. At least not for himself.

"I do not fear losing my job teaching health policy to a robot," he said. 
"I also do not fear losing my keynote engagements because I think human beings enjoy and need face-to-face interaction with real people."

That said, he's convinced "robots and artificial intelligence will play a major role in healthcare" in the coming years.

"I am convinced that computers will replace physicians as expert diagnosticians," says Bottles. "Neuroscience teaches us that the most brilliant human can only keep seven items straight in his head. Watson can take a question about a patient's symptoms, analyze it, generate a differential diagnosis, collect and evaluate the entire medical literature on the subject and come up with a diagnosis with a measurable level of confidence."

But beyond CDS, what will patients think of some beeping and whirring primary care physician, perhaps not too far in the future?

"We have early evidence that patients accept [robot doctors] just fine," says Bottles. "In a Boston hospital study, patients actually preferred the sociable humanoid robot to the human discharge planner. This surprising result is understandable when you hear the research subject comments that the robot had all the time in the world, did not judge them as stupid for asking so many questions and never had to answer a beeper during the session with the patient."

In years to come, "I think physicians are in for quite a culture shock," he adds, noting that most doctors "have not even considered this subject. They do not realize that humans have already demonstrated that they can form trusting relationships with sociable humanoid robots.