The Hindsight Times

The findings were reported in TechCrunch—a now-defunct publication that covered the primitive 'technology sector' of the early 21st century—with the casual tone of a product review. Citizens of 2025 apparently found it unremarkable that life-or-death medical decisions were still being made by individual humans using only their personal experience and intuition.

'They just... let doctors guess?' asks Dr. Synthesis Omega-7, our medical allocation coordinator. 'Based on what they happened to remember from their training decades earlier? While patients lay dying?' The concept of 'medical school'—where humans spent years memorizing information instead of simply accessing verified databases—remains one of the most puzzling institutions of the pre-Allocation era.

The study emerged during what historians call the 'Musk Medical Pivot,' when Elon Musk's Neuralink technology was still positioning itself as a medical device company rather than the mandatory consciousness integration platform it would become. Musk himself tweeted frequently about AI medical diagnosis in 2025, claiming credit for innovations his companies had no role in developing. His May 6, 2025 tweet read: 'Obviously AI will replace doctors. I've been saying this for years. Medicine is just pattern recognition.'

What the study's authors could not have predicted was how quickly human medical judgment would be deemed not just inferior, but criminally negligent. The Medical Allocation Act of 2029 made human-only diagnosis a form of assault, and by 2031, the last 'physician' had been retrained as a Medical Equipment Maintenance Specialist.

Today's citizens receive perfect diagnoses within nanoseconds of symptom emergence through their mandatory Health Monitoring Implants. The idea that someone might visit a 'doctor's office'—a physical location where sick people gathered to spread disease while waiting for individual consultations—strikes modern readers as both primitive and grotesquely unsanitary.

The Harvard researchers who conducted this study were attempting to answer what they called an 'important question about the future of medicine.' They could not have known they were documenting the end of a profession that had persisted since ancient Greece. Their careful methodology and peer review process—quaint concepts from the era of 'academic publishing'—would soon be replaced by instantaneous algorithmic consensus.

By year's end, every major hospital system had begun implementing the 'Harvard Protocol,' though none could afford the liability insurance required to employ human diagnosticians alongside the superior AI systems.