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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, compassion and understanding and nuanced understanding of individual desires when talking to someone is not what I associate AI with in my mind, but being able to assess sociological and cultural taboos and try to what a patient actually wants rather then what they might initially express seems like something I good doctor would get to through explorative conversation.

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Maybe removing a human from the equation would lead to more honest outcome? E.g. people google all sorts of issues more earnestly than they would describe it to the doctors. The bottleneck would be properly understanding what the user intends, which might be out of reach.

Indeed. Language has been historically difficult for AI, but I think it's even tougher here — language is less and less reliable the further we get from a shared experience, and this is a problem when describing our experiences of our own bodies, and much worse when describing our own minds.

For example, when I was coming off an SSRI, I was forewarned that I might get a sensation of "electric shocks"; the actual experience wasn't like that, though I could tell why they chose to describe it like that.

How different is the tightness in the chest during a heart attack from the tightness in the chest from exercising chest muscles?

I have no idea how doctors, GPs, and nurses manage this, though they seem to have relatively little trouble.

My experience of chatting with an internet chat-bot when trying to get some help with a product gives me little confidence we are close here.

Edit: wording

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