Despite its high-tech sheen, medicine looks a lot like some of the dinosaur industries that were upended by competition from unexpected sources: autos in the 1970s, for example, or mainframe computers in the 1980s.

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What top executive would bet his company the way Tom Watson did IBM in the early 1950s on mainframe computers or the way Bill Gates bet Microsoft in the mid-1990s on Windows if he knew failure would tempt prosecutors, politicians and bureaucrats to destroy him?

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The present generation of factory robots is akin to early mainframe computers in offices, reckons Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot, an American firm whose products include the Roomba, a robotic vacuum-cleaner, as well as military robots.

ECONOMIST: Automation