Our AI Midwife
astralcodexten.com
astralcodexten.com
Whatever it is being asked, it is great at throwing out new suggestions. This MRI idea sounds like another one of them.
It works well because humans are crap at checklists. For more or less anything you can think of, you'll come up with maybe 4 items, and the AI will add a few more. They may not be relevant, but the AI is very thorough.
I've noticed this happens a lot with characters that don't have any long lines and/or have limited vocabulary.
Furby trails off pretty quickly, Abathur from StarCraft 2 (great for shortening code comments BTW) starts talking like a typical LLM after a few sentences.
I make Abathur rephrase multi-line comments, because every LLM out there enjoys peppering code with them.
A successful recconect resets the counter. Efficient.
Doesn't always catch that distinctive style, but at least all the fluff is gone.
This Zerg is a software engineer at heart and has no tolerance for nonsense.
To be fair, this level of reasoning is on par with free tier chatgpt.
To me this story is less about a triumph of AI and more about a failure of the healthcare system.
It’s possible to both: celebrate the small victory and acknowledge that the larger problem still exists and affects the majority.
So no, just celebrate the personal victory, you don’t need to constantly be acknowledging the larger problem. The larger problems have always existed, and will always exist in one form or another.
At the same time, while I disagree that users are powerless, I can see that dealing with the larger problem is very much tiresome.
When those larger social problems continue to exist and are ignored by a huge swath of society then constantly acknowledging them becomes a prerequisite to moving forward. Of course it's annoying--no one wants to have to do that; but collective action is the only way to solve collective problems. And it's more than annoying to people at the receiving end of those problems. Women risk life-changing outcomes in all of the scenarios implied throughout this discussion.
Sometimes, technological solution to a given problem is much more effective and realistic that trying to fundamentally change human society.
To summarize my understanding: just like all things AI, the current frontier is quite "jagged". But there is broadly accepted evidence that AI does do better than human doctors, and even human doctors with AI, in several key aspects (like diagnostic reasoning!) while it sucks in others (pharmacology!)
And just like all things AI, as TFA suggests, the real advantage might simply come down to it being widely available, massively knowledgeable, relentless, and infinitely patient with us.
The post seems to portray the fibroid as objectively the cause of the symptoms, although there is no actual evidence of that. My wife tells me that fibroids grow and shrink in size over time, and that larger studies trying to quantify fibroids as a cause of infertility have been inconclusive. A point in time MRI seems to be correlation rather than causation.
It seems the common theme using AI for personal health issues is that post writers (partly due to privacy and length concerns) leave out the gory details like a full timeline of what tests were suggested, what they showed, how many providers were visited, and what treatments were trialled. The timeline is not really clear in this case, but clearly a lot of expensive tests, treatments, and providers happened in the almost four (!) years since they started using AI. Some of those interventions might have happened due to AI advice, and there are clues to this like the mention of possible endometriosis in the biopsy result. Unfortunately, there is just not enough info in the post to know.
That being said, it's clear that AI is helpful for explaining and assisting in advocating for health and luckily there was a positive outcome. Hopefully we can work out the optimal way to incorporate it into the health system.
It doesn't matter how great your doctors are, you're still only going to get an hour or so of their time per month if you are REALLY lucky.
Navigating this is really hard. The more AI assistance I can get the better.
You are the only person you can truly depend on when it comes to advocating for yourself and your health. But if you know that you are not properly equipped to do that job, then you need to get yourself a good health advocate. It’s like hiring a lawyer, but for your health.
Sadly, yes — that is what our healthcare system has devolved into.
This is going to be true in all medical systems, and really in all systems for all fields.
No one else (other than maybe your immediate family) is going to care as much about your situation as you are. Any doctor, in any system, is going to have multiple patients, and they will care about all of them. You, an individual, is going to care about your own life because it is the most important thing to you, and you aren’t splitting that amongst many different patients.
This is true about not just health, but literally everything. That's one reason AI is a big deal even when it's subhuman in performance. It empowers the individual to take care of themself (with as much "effort" as they'd like) rather than relying on another human.
Some examples:
- your health.
- your home.
- your children's education.
- your car.
- your finances.
- your (and your family's) safety.
- your elderly parents' welfare.
Remember when the new "personal computer" was the big-deal that was going to express your goals and act for your welfare? Yet today they're mainly spying on you and trying to dictate what you see and think.
The same corrupting forces will come for "personal AI", which is a political problem one can't passively delegate.
Rather than inventing a strawman to nitpick its word-choice and priorities [0], how about you engage with the substance instead? Here, I'll help:
"It is likely that personal 'AI'/LLM systems will end up arranged to favor other humans over their supposed owners/users." — Agree or disagree?
We've already seen that misalignment happen with consumer OSes, web-browser and ads, telemetry in cars, and a raft of copyright/DMCA stuff, all of which you've probably seen on HN before.
What makes you believe personal "AI" will escape the same influences?
> just like I think it’s completely ridiculous in the extreme to suggest that personal computers [...] represent a net negative
Usually when someone says a phrase like "your computer is mostly for spying on you" or "inkjet printers are demonic tools to harvest human suffering", most readers will understand those statements to be hyperbole, a rehtorical exaggeration to make a point... Not something literal to become angry about.
also, pretty funny that you think I'm angry about some rando's hysteria on HN lol
Yes, health systems worldwide have a number of problems caused by the need to operate at a scale and manage costs, same as with primary education. AI can create some efficiencies, but it almost certainly solves fewer healthcare or education problems than most AI maximalists believe.
Do you have any information to back this claim up?
Dismissing them otoh does not.
Of course AI "almost certainly" solves fewer problems than the people that think AI can solve all the problems think. That doesn't mean anything. Also notice how he puts together "AI didn't help" and "AI caused harm", and then says that's the most common experience.
Or, alternatively, the comment you're responding to is NOT empty — there is value in reminding all the AImaxxers on this board that GPT v10 may not have one-shotted the end of human suffering by early 2027.
Again, I think AI has applications in these niches - I really don't think we need doctors personally prescribing viagra or itch cream - but a lot of healthcare is people management.
To use the metaphor from the article, they found the keys in the last place they looked.
However, the real problem is that modern AI systems still hallucinate. And there is not yet any evidence that I’ve seen that AI systems can be trusted to work at these levels of efficiency and correctness at the tactical single-patient level, as opposed to the strategic population level.
I think lots more work needs to be done here.
With this sort of advice from LLMs, I think there's a lot of selective recall that's easily overlooked -- where we gloss over all the bad, dead-end lines of advice we seek from the LLM oracle.
This is the essence of how to make the medical system work for you. Advocate for yourself. AI helps know what to ask, why you should ask, and how to get past the first few layers of dismissals.
For the developers here, consider: "So our CI pipeline is super flaky, and it you have to restart it in a variety of non-intuitive ways. LLMs have been a massive breakthrough because the bot can run in an endless loop reading the confusing error messages and retrying the pipeline with different environment variables until it passes!"
This is really kinda the crux of it.
The AI suggested the MRI not because it had some insight into "oh there's something only an MRI can detect going on", it was just a "collect more data" situation.
Frankly, the author of the blog should probably have gotten a second opinion from a different fertility doctor sometime in the intervening time period.
As someone who also went through multiple rounds of IVF with my partner, the number of ultrasounds you get during the process is immense. It's hard to call missing a peach-sized fibroid that many times anything other than gross incompetence.
Of course, but what else would you think an LLM does? That is the insight: sifting through a sea of information and parsing it without the same emotional or other cognitive biases the original human recipient applied to it.
Ehm, no. I want doctors by my side working in a system that is not meant to be producing gains for the rich investors but to help the sick and sad.
Just imagine what could be done with all those billions poured into datacenters and GPUs, if they were invested in public goods like a decent health system!
OP is playing the cards he has been dealt, not wishing that he was playing a completely different game.
> I think there is a whole lot to be worried about with AI development, and I think we should do much more to make it safe. I also think it shouldn’t be lost how it’s helping out regular people in ways that are far more profound than generating trivia questions for drunk people.
I'm seeing a plea of "AI is really helpful, don't take it away", which might be true in a specific case but is supporting AI in general, and I got the feeling that is what OP wanted with their post. In my opinion, most of the money, energy, water and whatever else is getting invested in AI might be better invested elsewhere, with less damage to society and the environment and still the same nice outcomes.
About $310B+ has been invested in OpenAI and Anthropic represents their total venture funding over their entire corporate histories.
The majority of doctor's offices and hospitals are already nonprofit. Many of them are state-run.
By contrast, the U.S. spends $14 Billion to $15 Billion every single day on healthcare, around 5 trillion per year.