3 ms·
If someone wants an analogy: Nobody understands exactly how painkillers (aspirin, paracetamol etc.) work on the molecular level. Yet they are generally held to
by semi-extrinsic 10y ago
If someone wants an analogy:
Nobody understands exactly how painkillers (aspirin, paracetamol etc.) work on the molecular level. Yet they are generally held to be quite useful.
Edit: electroconvulsive therapy is an even more extreme example; we have no clue how it works, but it's very effective on severe depression. We only know it works because some Italians back in the olden days, before ethics committees were invented, decided to electro-shock a bunch of "crazy people" to see what happened. The reason they tried it was that electroshocking of pigs for slaughter had been observed to give a temporary anaesthetic effect.
- peterbonney 10y agoOr: nobody understands exactly how your doctor's brain reaches its conclusion about what's wrong with you, but you still trust it.
- cscurmudgeon 10y agoIt is not like the doctor can explain in English when you ask him for details. Not all.
- vertex-four 10y agoOr, to put it in other words - how your car's AI decides that there's five cars around you probably isn't that interesting. How it decides that based on its input, it should probably slam the brakes, is interesting.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Joof 10y agoI have a difficult time getting psychiatrists to do exactly this, so no change here in that area.
- cscurmudgeon 10y agoSo how do we get the first sick volunteers for Dr. Neural Network?
- jerf 10y agoAI's been in medical diagnosis for a long time and many people have been treated by it already. There was a news article a month or two ago from IBM for using Watson to do it, and it struck me as obviously a PR piece because "an AI system diagnosed a patient" is breaking news somewhere circa 1980, not now. Its scientific content was zero.
- DonaldFisk 10y agoIndeed. But circa 1980 they would have been using expert systems, which typically were able to justify their reasoning.
- cscurmudgeon 10y agoWe are talking about neural networks not general AI.