Comment by telxosser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by telxosser | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What data was it using again? The blood panel your doctor orders every one to two years?

Medical diagnosis is a trivial problem for machine learning to beat humans. Humans are terrible at this.

The problem is there is not even the concept of high frequency medical data. Imagine machine learning in quant stock trading with samples once a year. Of course it isn't going to work.

The problem is all in the externalities. Doctors don't want AI. They can see the automation path and their bank account change down the line quite clearly. Not to mention most doctors don't know anything about data science so how can you have any faith in the algorithm prediction? No one wants to be the test case and then get a law suit. "I was just following what the computer said was correct". Wrong answer, pay up.

The real irony to me is in a 100 years people look at the current medical system as complete quakery. Literally have everything right now to build medical super intelligence but stuck with the human doctors doing the exact same things from 50 years ago.

I agree with this so strongly. The medical gatekeeping is absolutely absurd. I can't remember the last time I learned something from a doctor that I hadn't already learned myself with a quick online search. For every visit in the past decade or longer they either told me what I already knew or we were both stumped.

If drives me crazy that I can't make my own decisions about my own health, even for trivial cases. I've spent countless hours and dollars going to pointless doctor visits just to get a routine refill. Literally the conversation at most of these visits is as simple as me telling the doc that everything is fine with $medA, lets just keep it the same; followed by the doctor saying sure and writing me a new script. Such a massive inefficient waste of time.

Yep. Rank and file MDs don’t provide a whole lot of value except to people who are totally ignorant of common illnesses, health issues, or injuries.

If I had the ability to order my own tests, blood work, and adjust the dosages of my meds I could do it a hell of a lot better than the doctor I see every 6-12 months. Antibiotics are the some of the worst with this. The doc literally doesn’t even look at me, I just describe my symptoms and they go “yep sounds like an infection” — like Gods almighty you could be a web form. And it would would actually cost my insurance less which is even more infuriating.

Specialists I have found are actually useful and so I can’t really bring myself to hate that Tier 1 MDs act as a screen for people whose time is valuable.

> to people who are totally ignorant of common illnesses, health issues, or injuries.

Hundreds of thousands, no, potentially millions of people have decided to take hydrochloroquine and ivermectin as a treatment for Covid. The people who believe that they're in a position to dictate their own medical treatment are the ones who most often are "totally ignorant".

Yes, it's more expensive in isolation - in the best case scenario - to have someone competent see a doctor for a refill. But it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the rare case of someone saying "I have self-diagnosed as needing hydrochloroquine for my Covid" and then dying from an overdose after they passed out and their family took them to an expensive emergency room. Your experience is not universal.

I'm not sure that it would be necessarily the doctor that would actually gets condemned in this case. Could as well / instead be the programmer(s) that made the AI.

But this is why the current crop of AIs (which Watson itself might NOT be part of) is problematic : they're too much black boxes.

So they directly clash with the laws that assume on one hand perfect transparency of the tools used, and on the other perfect responsibility of the people using them.

How long before the use itself of a neural network is deemed to have been illegal because it broke one of the laws mandating the explanation of the algorithm that has been used to make a decision to the person that this decision targeted ?

Eventually, way down the line, this might involve giving some kind of civil status to computer programs so they can actually be made responsible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com