Warning: Doctors Risk Becoming Obsolete Like the Computer Now

In the 1950s, NASA’s predecessor — and then NASA itself — employed rooms full of people whose job title was “computer.” Their work was calculation — by hand, by slide rule, for hours on end. Katherine Johnson was one of them, and she was extraordinary at it. Then machines like the IBM 7090 arrived, and over time, electronic computers quietly took over much of the work — and eventually the name.

Here’s the part most people forget. The human computers who panicked and clung to their slide rules became obsolete. But the ones who learned to run the machine — Johnson among them — became more valuable than ever. She didn’t compete with the computer. She learned to work with it. And when the astronauts didn’t trust the new machine, John Glenn asked for her by name to check its numbers before he flew.

That is the whole story of leverage in one anecdote. The tool doesn’t decide who wins. Your relationship to the tool does.

Right now, the same shift is happening to doctors — and most of us are still reaching for the slide rule.

Most doctors are using AI to survive. Almost none are using it to escape.

Ask a doctor how they use AI and you’ll usually hear the same answers. They use it to summarise a guideline. Sometimes they ask it to explain a rare condition. Maybe they draft a discharge letter with it. All useful, all clinical, and all of it just makes you slightly faster at a job you still have to physically turn up for.

But here’s the catch. Clinical AI makes you a better servant of the rota. It does nothing for the gap between what you earn and what you feel trapped by. That gap is where burnout lives, and no amount of faster discharge summaries closes it.

The real leverage sits everywhere else — in the large chunk of your week that has nothing to do with the shop floor: the admin, the content, the portfolio, the side income you keep meaning to build. That is where AI stops being a productivity toy and starts buying back your actual life.

The hidden work you’re not delegating

Let me be specific about my own week, because vague advice helps no one.

I’m an emergency medicine doctor going through what most of us still call CESR — now officially the Portfolio Pathway. On top of that, I run two content channels. I’m also a former financial adviser and a property investor. On paper, none of that fits into a life with real family commitments. A few years ago it genuinely didn’t — I was drowning in low-value, repeatable tasks that ate my evenings.

So I did what Katherine Johnson did. Instead of competing with the machine, I started programming it. Not with code, but with clear instructions, repeated systems, and a willingness to hand over work I used to guard.

Here’s what I actually delegated this quarter:

→ My CESR portfolio reflections. I discuss casesin a critical way with AI; AI drafts a structured reflection in my voice, which I then edit. What used to take 45 minutes now takes 10.

→ My content pipeline. A rough idea becomes a blog post and ten social posts, scheduled and ready. This used to be a full weekend. Now it’s a single sitting.

→ Email triage. My inbox gets sorted, drafted, and prioritised before I open it. As a result, I reclaim maybe three hours a week I never noticed losing.

→ Research and summarising. Guidelines, papers, financial documents — distilled to the parts that matter, with the source flagged so I can verify.

None of this is glamorous. But added up, it’s close to a day a week back. And a day a week, compounded over a career, is a different life.

The Leverage Ledger

Here’s the framework I use to decide what to hand over. I call it the Leverage Ledger, and you can build yours in twenty minutes.

Take a sheet of paper. Write down every recurring task that fills your non-clinical week — admin, portfolio, content, finances, the lot. Then score each one on two axes.

First, how much do you uniquely add? A reflection that needs your clinical judgement scores high. Reformatting a document scores low.

Second, how repeatable is it? Something you do the same way every week is highly repeatable. A one-off negotiation is not.

Now look at the quadrant. The tasks that are low-value-to-you and highly repeatable are your delegation goldmine. Those are the slide rules. So hand them to the machine first.

The point isn’t to delegate everything. Katherine Johnson didn’t stop doing maths — she stopped doing the maths a machine could do, so she could do the maths only she could do. Your clinical reasoning, your relationships, your judgement: those stay. Everything orbiting them is up for grabs.

Put plainly, you’re not trying to work less. Instead, you’re trying to spend your finite hours on the things that actually compound — and your income and your freedom both sit firmly in that category.

Why this matters more for doctors than anyone

There’s a specific reason this lever is so powerful for us, and it comes down to maths.

A doctor’s time is expensive. Depending on grade, specialty, location and rota gap, a locum shift might pay you £70 – £150+ an hour. So every hour you spend on a £15-an-hour admin task, you are effectively setting fire to the difference. You wouldn’t pay a colleague consultant rates to file your paperwork, yet that’s exactly what you do to yourself every evening.

Worse, the NHS pays you for presence, not output. The system is a near-monopsony — one dominant buyer of your labour — which means it has little reason to reward efficiency. So if you want leverage, you have to build it yourself, on your own time, outside the system that benefits from you not having any.

AI, meanwhile, is one of the first tools I’ve seen that lets a single person build serious leverage without hiring a team, raising capital, or quitting their job. That’s not hype. That’s simply what’s now possible that wasn’t three years ago.

And the doctors who learn it early will spend the next decade quietly compounding the advantage — while the ones who dismiss it as a gimmick keep trading evenings for tasks a machine would do for pennies.

Start this week

You don’t need a system overhaul. You need one delegated task and the proof that it works. Here’s how to begin.

1. Build your Leverage Ledger. Twenty minutes, two axes, one sheet of paper. Find the three tasks that are repeatable and beneath your real value.
2. Delegate one — properly. Pick the most painful of the three. Then write the AI a clear, detailed instruction as if briefing a new assistant, and refine it until the output is genuinely usable.
3. Bank the time, don’t spend it. When you save three hours, resist filling them with more work. Instead, put them toward the side income, the family, or the thinking that actually moves your life.
4. Reinvest the proof. Once one task works, the second is easy. Build a small library of your best instructions and reuse them, because leverage compounds when you stop reinventing it each time.
5. Verify everything that matters. AI drafts; you sign off. For anything clinical, financial, or going out in your name, you remain the final check — exactly as John Glenn still wanted Johnson to check the numbers.

The machine started taking the word “computer” around seventy years ago. It didn’t make the best of them redundant. Instead, it made them indispensable — but only the ones who learned to run it.

The same offer is on the table for you right now. The only question is whether you reach for the slide rule or the machine.

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This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research and, if needed, ask for advice from a qualified financial adviser regulated by the FCA.