Perfect summary of what's wrong. I often wonder what would happen if the best minds were trying to solve the world's problems instead of getting people to buy things they don't want.
I mean instead of adding polyfills for "fetch" api and "es6 promises" that brings a gazillion dependencies with them, one can simply add jquery package that has ZERO runtime dependencies(https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/package.json) and have ajax calls, promises and much, much more out of the box. I love jQuery.
1 dependency that's 34.6KB minified. That's a lot more than the two separate dependencies, and besides, once you've gone to the trouble of adding a package.json to add one dependency, adding one more is a very small step.
(I'm writing this in Firefox Beta for Android, for what it's worth.)
You misunderstand--I desperately wanted FirefoxOS phones to succeed, precisely because an Open Web and free software is important, and ultimately a phone that can run any arbitrary software or OS. I know FirefoxOS wasn't that, but it seemed to be a step in the right direction. But if a phone is a lousy application platform and if developers can't be enticed to hack on them, then the question of freedom is moot.
Actually, machines will never replace human judgment. It's absurd to even think machines are capable of such a thing. Machines are tools for humans to use. If your job is adding numbers or stacking boxes or something, sure. But anything beyond the basics is science fiction or delusion. A machine will never even approach an understanding of psychic continuity, for example.
Now, I'm absolutely not saying that we can't engineer solutions in the medical field. You know more than I do about what diagnostic evaluation takes and how procedures are performed, so I don't pretend to understand that aspect perfectly. What I do know for sure is that a machine cannot and will never replicate human thought and decision making and cannot replace a doctor ever until the end of time.
Also, you bring up a good point about salaries. Doctors are important and do great work but deserve to make no more than double or triple what the lowest paid person in their society makes. It's time to bring lawyers, doctors, accountants, developers, engineers—the professional class—back down to reality with the rest of us.
But that's not the problem here, as everyone is explaining. The problem is that they are wasting all their money paying massive interest on massive debt. One of those times that a business gets caught up in tie same cycle as is usually reserved for people. It's quite treasonous and the first things to get hacked are decents who are just trying to get by.
