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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

I've worked in a medical imaging lab before, there are currently real, working models that are able to e.g. accurately segment organs in 3D to find info such as volume. And of course there are diagnostic tools as well. You're complaining about GPS apps with inaccurate information. That's kind of a non-sequitur.

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I mention GPS routing because it's been subject to incredible investment yet are still reliant on humans to deal with routine unexpected events.

I don't see the point of your organ example. That sort of data analysis seems like the sort of things computers do routinely; how does that address the need to have a human in the loop? To use a different example, software for doing analysis of car and plane designs has been the subject of decades of development. Yet engineering teams for new car and plane designs are bigger than ever.

My phone also knows that there is an accident on my route home, messages me before I get into the car, and tells me to take an alternative route. I cant remember the last time my GPS didn't navigate directly to my destination.

Another way to phrase the question: Would you rather use a paper map or GPS?

But both a paper map and a GPS are designed to aid a human operator. This thread is about replacing the human operator.

Actually the automobile and aviation sectors are under more strict regulation than Healthcare because the ECU software and aviation software running, when making a mistake, does not only influence one life but many. So whilst being added more and more in cars and planes, you will see AI faster in Healthcare than in cars or planes. I've been in a shared European subsidiary project recently (http://www.emc2-project.eu/) and these sectors were always laughing when I complained about FDA. I wouldn't want to work a single day in their sectors. They had to disable the second core on a dual core fpga because it was not allowed. Meanwhile, I was happily running my data science in a cloud network.

Regarding design, design is a peculiar thing potentially much more difficult to automate than a medical diagnosis because there is only emotion attached. For medical diagnosis for a lot of cases it is just comparing to others and spotting the differences in the images as early as possible. Before even a human eye can spot them. And not with one dimension but hundreds. Many algorithms do not give the actual diagnosis, they let the doctor know this scan deviates from the default in marked places so a doctor can assess quickly without searching.

> Regarding design, design is a peculiar thing potentially much more difficult to automate than a medical diagnosis because there is only emotion attached.

"Emotion" is not the reason companies still design airplanes and CPUs by hand.

True. Was for the cars. The other part holds for airplanes. By the way, I know of at least one case where a cpu algorithm steered the team on optimizing the resistance of a plane wing (or whatever needs to be optimized there, it was a conversation over beers). Example was that they never could have thought of that improvement themselves. Basically you had to be very stupid to try it as it couldn't work, until a spinoff (one of the millions of automated tries) actually did. CPUs I have no knowledge of.

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