While we tend to focus on law and lawyers here, let’s not forget that we aren’t the only profession facing “issues,” both in practice and on the interwebz.  It seems physicians have theirs as well.  From Medpage Today :

Rather our subject is doctor ‘bots on Twitter — automated programs masquerading as human physicians dispensing medical information.

We follow a lot of physicians and other healthcare professionals on Twitter and engage in dialogues and organized group discussions (“chats”) with many of them. Some time ago we noticed a few Twitter Docs who never seemed to take part in commenting, retweeting, discussions or other types of “social networking” activities, which is what Twitter is all about.

Rather, these physicians just pump out medical factoids on a wide variety of health topics and conditions, complete with links to more information. Two of these Twitter Docs are @IntegrateMD and @NowHealthMD, and we set out to communicate with and engage them. It didn’t take us long to realize that @IntegrateMD and @NowHealthMD are the same person, Dr. Nicole Evans, who describes herself as “a resident physician with a passion for Integrative Medicine” who loves “sharing info on health, disease and the art of medicine.”

Let’s get this out of the way up front: 

Anyone who uses the word “passion” (or any of its permutations) in their twitter, blog or website is trying to scam you.  Whether law, medicine or women’s shoes, it’s the word of the day that’s designed to conceal an absence of skill, education or competence behind a word that smells as if it should be meaningful yet isn’t.  Passion can’t be tested, quantified, proven or challenged, so its use conveys an impression of worth while concealing a lie.  If someone describes themselves as “passionate,” stay far away, unless you happen to be one of those criminal defense lawyers who isn’t bothers by cozying up to liars, in which case, what are you doing here?

Bots.  Clean and easy, never tiring and giving the appearance of a real doc out there helping all the nice folks who need to know something about hemorrhoids.

Something else we noticed about Dr. Evans is that nearly all of her links pointed to one place, a web site called Helium.com where writers contribute articles and share advertising revenues with the site’s owners. Helium contains 360 articles by “Nicole Evans, M.D.”

Dr. Evans’ articles are rather short and the sample we looked at contained no citations, footnotes or other authoritative sources of her information. The articles contain a fairly large number of hyperlinks that appear to be automatically generated. Many of the links point back to other Helium articles while others point to an online shopping catalog called smarter.com.

As the post notes, Dr. Evans is quite the prolific twitterer and poster, and has the most extraordinary breadth of interest and information.  Unless there is no “Dr. Evans,” and it’s just a bot spewing low rent content taken from elsewhere. 

Does this cause any harm?

That depends on the quality and accuracy of the information published and whether or not it’s OK to subject human subjects to an ongoing Turing Test. Without anyone to verify and fact-check these articles, these automated “RoboDocs” are feeding the public misleading and potentially out-of-date or even erroneous information at a rate faster than any one human could possibly keep up with.

The issues are no different than what lawyers are looking at on the internet, and what the public is “learning” from the content spewed in our little corner of the universe.  While coloring crap with sweet words like making information accessible to all gives the impression that this benefits of others, it presents two very dangerous problems:

First, there is no assurance that  any of it is accurate at all, or appropriate under any given set of circumstances.  The internet is a sewer of false, bad and dangerous information, and those whose purpose is to spread it as far and wide as possible are far more likely to have their crap seen by the public (after all, assuring that it gets seen is their full-time job) than those who are concerned with the quality of their content.

And even then, the thrust of lawyers who  justify giving bad advice because they need some business fudges the line between the non-lawyer/bot websites telling people about the law in pigeon-English.  The latter may be bad, but the former isn’t much better.

Second, otherwise credible voices keep pounding away at those who are vulnerable for lack of income at the upside to technology without balancing their sales pitch with the potential for the harm they could cause.  One of the more thoughtful commenters, Jordan Furlong, has become an enormous disappointment in this respect, having jumped blindly on the technology bandwagon that perpetuates the lie that lawyers must degrade themselves to meet the demands and expectations that are rising from the gutter.  One would expect this from the bottom feeders like Solo Practice University, which lauds such silliness as lawyer coaches who have 12 minutes experience and nothing approaching success in any realm of life.  But Jordan?

Law firms used to dictate the terms upon which legal services were performed — work assignment, work flow, scheduling, timeliness, format, delivery, billing, pricing, and many others — because buyers had no other options. Those options have now emerged, powered by technology and driven forward by market demand.

• They promise legal documents not just faster and cheaper but also, incredibly, better, in terms of quality and reliability.
  
• They promise greater efficiency and transparency in the previously laborious RFP-driven process of choosing and pricing law firms.
  
• They promise real-time integration of world-class legal knowledge into the legal work production process.
  
• They promise alignment of a legal task’s value with its performer’s skills, qualification and location.
  
• And at ILTA, they demonstrated delivery on all these promises and more.

But the emergence of these options isn’t the real story. The real story is that firms are buying these new products and services, not selling them. They’re taking marching orders about their use, not issuing them. They’re accepting the new realities of the marketplace, not inventing them. Law firms are now drifting to the periphery of the marketplace, trading places with technology-driven outsiders whose own importance increases daily. Law firms, whether they realize it or not, are settling into a new role: sources of valued specialists called upon to perform certain tasks within a larger legal system that they did not create and that they do not control.

This is a fantasy, the sort of nonsensical crap spread among the technorati wannabes who argue that any kid fresh out of law school can be as cool as the most experienced lawyer if he only gets an iPad. 

Technology may well bring useful tools to our practice, but they do not dictate our practice.  The vultures who use technology in an effort to infiltrate the practice of law and medicine, to circumvent the judgment and advice that distinguishes what real professionals do versus the bot that spits out factoids, want to convince you that they are the future, that they own the future, that they own us.  This is no more law than it is medicine.

Do not believe that the future compels us to surrender to technology.  We will only become the serfs of the robot overlords if we buy into this crap.  It’s a lie.  Do not surrender.

H/T Venkat “I ain’t nobody’s slave” Balasubrumani