This is like saying that self-driving cars won't ever become a thing because someone behind the wheel needs to be to blame. The article cites AI systems that the FDA already has cleared to operate without a physicians' validation.
Which is literally the case so far. No manufacturer has shown any willingness to take on the liability of self driving at any scale to date. Waymo has what? 700 cars on the road with the finances and lawyers of Google backing it.
Let me know when the bean counters sign off on fleets in the millions of vehicles.
They have over 2000 on the road and are growing: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/31/techcrunch-mobility-a-new-...
Of course there's 200M+ personal vehicles registered in the US.
I have to admit if my life were on the line I might be that Karen.
False negatives are far more problematic.
A hard to spot tumor is an easy negative result with high confidence by an AI
If it's something serious enough a patient getting bad news will probably want a second opinion no matter who gave them the first one.
I remember a funny question that my non-technical colleagues asked me during the presentation of some ML predictions. They asked me, “How wrong is this prediction?” And I replied that if I knew, I would have made the prediction correct. Errors are estimated on a test data set, either overall or broken down by groups.
The technological advances have supported medical professionals so far, but not substituted them: they have allowed medical professionals to do more and better.
People makes mistakes all the time, you don't want to be the one affected by their mistake.
If we don't allow this, I think we're more likely to find that the initial screening will be denied as not medically indicated than we are to find insurance companies covering two screenings when the first is negative. And I think we're better off with the increased routine screenings for a lot of conditions.
It's the same way that we can save time and money if we just don't wash our hands when cooking food. Sure it's true. But someone WILL get sick and we WILL get in trouble for it
theres an MBA salivating over that presntation
Also $2M is absurdly absurdly low for a successful medical malpractice suit
Scale. Doctors and taxi drivers represent several points of limited liability, whereas an AI would be treating (and thus liable for) all patients. If a hospital treats one hundred patients with ten doctors, and one doctor is negligent, then his patients might sue him; some patients seeing other doctors might sue the hospital if they see his hiring as indicative of broader institutional neglect, but they’d have to prove this in a lawsuit. If this happened with a software-based classifier being used at every major hospital, you’re talking about a class action lawsuit including every possible person who was ever misdiagnosed by the software; it’s a much more obvious candidate for a class action because the software company has more money and it was the same thing happening every time, whereas a doctor’s neglect or incompetence is not necessarily indicative of broader neglect or incompetence at an institutional level.
> If there's no regulatory blocks, then I don't see how it doesn't ultimately just become a cost comparison.
To make a fair comparison you’d have to look at how many more people are getting successful interventions due to the AI decreasing the cost of diagnosis.
The doctor's malpractice insurance kicks in, but realistically you become uninsurable after that.
Same problem for any company.
Planes can land themselves with zero human intervention in all kinds of weather conditions and operating environments. In fact, there was a documentary where the plane landed so precisely that you could hear the tires hitting the center lane marker as it landed and then taxied.
Yet we STILL have pilots as a "last line of defense" in case something goes wrong.
I'm not fully up to speed on the Autonomi / Garmin Autoland implementation found today on Cirrus and other aircraft -- but it's not for "everyday" use for landings.
[0] https://pilotinstitute.com/can-an-airplane-land-itself/
[1] https://askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/
So I'm not sure what "planes can land on their own" gets us anyway even if autopilot on modern airliners can do an awful lot on their own (including following flight plans in ways that are more advanced than before).
The Garmin Autoland basically announces "my pilot is incapacitated and the plane is going to land itself at <insert a nearby runway>" without asking for landing clearance (which is very cool in and of itself but nowhere near what anyone would consider autonomous).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TIBeso4abU (among other things, but this video is arguably the most fun one)
Edit: and yes maybe the "pilots are basically superfluous now" misconception is a pet peeve for me (and I'm guessing parent as well)
It does not have logic to deal with unforeseen situations (with some exceptions of handling collision avoidance advisories). Automating ATC, clearance, etc, is also not currently realistic (let alone "the easiest part") because ATC doesn't know what an airliner's constraints may be in terms of fuel capacity, company procedures for the aircraft, etc, so it can't just remotely instruct it to say "fly this route / hold for this long / etc".
Heck, even the current autolands need the pilot to control the aircraft when the speed drops low enough that the rudder is no longer effective because the nose gear is usually not autopilot-controllable (which is a TIL for me). So that means the aircraft can't vacate the runway, let alone taxi to the gate.
I think airliners and modern autopilot and flight computers are amazing systems but they are just not "autonomous" by any stretch.
Edit: oh, sorry, maybe you were only asking about the Garmin Autoland not being autonomous, not airliner autoland. Most of this still applies, though.
There's no other regime of flight where you're asking the aircraft to go from "I want to do this" to "I want to do the exact opposite of that" in a matter of seconds, and the physics is not in your favor.
Tesla hit with $243 million in damages after jury finds its Autopilot feature contributed to fatal crash
The verdict follows a three-week trial that threw a spotlight on how Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have marketed their driver-assistance software.
Medicine is existential. The job of a doctor is not to look at data, give a diagnosis and leave. A crucial function of practicing doctors is communication and human interaction with their patients.
When your life is on the line (and frankly, even if it isn't), you do not want to talk to an LLM. At minimum you expect that another human can explain to you what is wrong with you and what options there are for you.
What? If I don't trust the machine or the software running it, absolutely I do, if I have to share the road with that car, as its mistakes are quite capable of killing me.
(Yes, I can die in other accidents too. But saying "there's no reason for me to care if the cars around me are filled with people sleeping while FSD tries to solve driving" is not accurate.)