4 ms·

This story is a great reminder why AIs don't need to perform at Nobel Laureate level in order to make almost all humans obsolete: Because almost all humans don'

by p-e-w 4y ago

This story is a great reminder why AIs don't need to perform at Nobel Laureate level in order to make almost all humans obsolete: Because almost all humans don't perform like Nobel Laureates either. ChatGPT isn't competing against the cutting edge of medical knowledge, but against the indifferent, overworked, incompetent individual professionals that are all that's available to most of us. No wonder it comes out on top.

quickthrower2 4y ago
ChatGPT … Fixed Dog I think it will be a long while before that ellipsis is, well nothing.
vasco 4y ago
"Take some paracetamol and come back in two weeks" written in a piece of paper would be enough to replace most of my doctors (even if I already managed symptoms for 2 weeks before going). In the worst case they prescribed that for a brain tumour. So yeah I'll take google and ChatGPT and upload my MRIs there before I trust some random person that I can't even tell if they are good at their job. ChatGPT at least doesn't speak matter of factly and peer pressure me into doing whatever thing takes less time to get me out the door and the next person in.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  It'll be interesting to see how long the medical industry will manage to FUD people into being scared of taking their symptoms to an AI, considering that they have been treating patients like cattle to be stamped off essentially since forever. The bar of competence set by most doctors is so hilariously low that any smart person with a search engine has been able to outdo the typical GP for a while now. All the accumulated knowledge these professionals have is worthless if they don't take more than 3 minutes to look at the patient. Imagine if, as an engineering consultant, you took just 3 minutes in total for your customer, including the customer describing their problem. They would literally be better off just googling it instead. There's no reason to expect this to be different for doctors, and indeed it isn't.
  - numpad0 4y ago
    > Imagine if, as an engineering consultant, you took just 3 minutes in total for your customer, including the customer describing their problem. So, as a HN user, how many times did that not happen to you?
    - p-e-w 4y ago
      It never happened. If I, or any other engineer, tried to treat customers like that we'd get laughed out of the "consultation". That people (are forced to) accept this kind of behavior from medical professionals is nothing short of insane.
      - numpad0 4y ago
        Is it your point that it's insane to expect customer to appreciate your intervention in that attitude, or that it's insane to believe that you can identify a problem that way? Aren't you conflating value/social engineering with technical problem solving? I mean, have you seriously never had a "knowing where to put the chalk mark" moment, neither in the medical nor in the engineering fields, neither as a customer nor as the professional, aside that it is not a great presentation to precede a fat invoice?
- bboygravity 4y ago
  I'm going to guess that you're in The Netherlands?
  - vasco 4y ago
    I made it easy by giving away the paracetamol line, didn't I?
    - bboygravity 4y ago
      And the 2 weeks ;) It's a known stereotype of Dutch GP's among expats in The Netherlands: no matter what limb(s) are missing, no matter how long you've been bleeding: the first time you go you go see the GP you'll get "take paracetamol and let me know if you still have issues in 2 weeks". lol
- lostlogin 4y ago
  I’m an MR tech. A few weeks ago I was scanning a shoulder with unusual muscle denervation. The images have their signal boosted by AI, and resolution doubled by AI. I described the image findings to GPT and asked for a differential. The radiologist thought the results reasonable. It was AI all the way down.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
Maybe not in this specific case, but in many fields the problem is knowledge management. There are too many things to know, to remember, too many niches for super rare special cases, and then you need to properly put the right things together at the right time. Every now and then there is an article about scientists in some field rediscover a principle or technique that was known over a hundred years ago already but didn't have any practical applications so was forgotten again, but could then solve some problem we were having today for the past two decades. Because nobody remembered that obscure paper by some dude who didn't achieve anything remarkable during his lifetime. So we just spent 20 years reinventing the wheel. This is the kind of task I expect AI to excel at. It might at least currently be on the cognitive level of an overconfident 6yo in many regards, but a 6yo with more knowledge than any single person alive. You will still need humans for a good while to sanity check the output and for the bigger picture though.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  > You will still need humans for a good while to sanity check the output Did you read the story? We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round. And while this is an anecdote, it is by no means an isolated incident. Human professionals are being outperformed on trivial tasks (note that this was a common complication of a common disease) by chatbots. I'm far more scared by human incompetence than by AI making mistakes.
  - gwd 4y ago
    > We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round. On the contrary; we need AIs to "completeness check" the experts, because experts are prone to forget things or have missing knowledge; we need humans to "sanity check" the AIs because current LLMs are insane: mixed in with brilliant pieces of insight are super-obvious mistakes and outright hallucinations.
    - p-e-w 4y ago
      Many human professionals are incompetent in ways that go beyond just "missing knowledge". This dramatically understates what a colossal problem incompetence is, and one that AIs don't appear to suffer from in the same way. Already with the current generation of AIs, and their strange mistakes and so-called hallucinations, I'd be hard pressed to say that they are overall worse than human professionals, considering what I've seen from those.
yosito 4y ago
Maybe it's not competing against us, maybe it's doing the things that we shouldn't have to spend our time doing, so that we can free up our time for more valuable pursuits. It's just gonna take us a little bit of time to figure out what those pursuits are.
- Zetice 4y ago
  Yeah I don’t read this story as an example of how a vet is obsolete, but how a vet can be more effective with assists from LLMs. Enhance not replace! The map is not the territory, so you’ll always want to pair a native with the expert (and the territory here is reality).
datadeft 4y ago
I agree with the technical aspect that ChatGPT can diagnose sickness probably better than humans. The problem is that our current workflows do not allow medical professionals to offload responsibility. I think the best scenario is to include ML models in the diagnosis workflow instead of making humans obsolete.

by p-e-w 4y ago

quickthrower2 4y ago

ChatGPT … Fixed Dog I think it will be a long while before that ellipsis is, well nothing.

vasco 4y ago

"Take some paracetamol and come back in two weeks" written in a piece of paper would be enough to replace most of my doctors (even if I already managed symptoms for 2 weeks before going). In the worst case they prescribed that for a brain tumour. So yeah I'll take google and ChatGPT and upload my MRIs there before I trust some random person that I can't even tell if they are good at their job. ChatGPT at least doesn't speak matter of factly and peer pressure me into doing whatever thing takes less time to get me out the door and the next person in.

p-e-w 4y ago
It'll be interesting to see how long the medical industry will manage to FUD people into being scared of taking their symptoms to an AI, considering that they have been treating patients like cattle to be stamped off essentially since forever. The bar of competence set by most doctors is so hilariously low that any smart person with a search engine has been able to outdo the typical GP for a while now. All the accumulated knowledge these professionals have is worthless if they don't take more than 3 minutes to look at the patient. Imagine if, as an engineering consultant, you took just 3 minutes in total for your customer, including the customer describing their problem. They would literally be better off just googling it instead. There's no reason to expect this to be different for doctors, and indeed it isn't.
- numpad0 4y ago
  > Imagine if, as an engineering consultant, you took just 3 minutes in total for your customer, including the customer describing their problem. So, as a HN user, how many times did that not happen to you?
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    It never happened. If I, or any other engineer, tried to treat customers like that we'd get laughed out of the "consultation". That people (are forced to) accept this kind of behavior from medical professionals is nothing short of insane.
    - numpad0 4y ago
      Is it your point that it's insane to expect customer to appreciate your intervention in that attitude, or that it's insane to believe that you can identify a problem that way? Aren't you conflating value/social engineering with technical problem solving? I mean, have you seriously never had a "knowing where to put the chalk mark" moment, neither in the medical nor in the engineering fields, neither as a customer nor as the professional, aside that it is not a great presentation to precede a fat invoice?
bboygravity 4y ago
I'm going to guess that you're in The Netherlands?
- vasco 4y ago
  I made it easy by giving away the paracetamol line, didn't I?
  - bboygravity 4y ago
    And the 2 weeks ;) It's a known stereotype of Dutch GP's among expats in The Netherlands: no matter what limb(s) are missing, no matter how long you've been bleeding: the first time you go you go see the GP you'll get "take paracetamol and let me know if you still have issues in 2 weeks". lol
lostlogin 4y ago
I’m an MR tech. A few weeks ago I was scanning a shoulder with unusual muscle denervation. The images have their signal boosted by AI, and resolution doubled by AI. I described the image findings to GPT and asked for a differential. The radiologist thought the results reasonable. It was AI all the way down.

iforgotpassword 4y ago

Maybe not in this specific case, but in many fields the problem is knowledge management. There are too many things to know, to remember, too many niches for super rare special cases, and then you need to properly put the right things together at the right time. Every now and then there is an article about scientists in some field rediscover a principle or technique that was known over a hundred years ago already but didn't have any practical applications so was forgotten again, but could then solve some problem we were having today for the past two decades. Because nobody remembered that obscure paper by some dude who didn't achieve anything remarkable during his lifetime. So we just spent 20 years reinventing the wheel. This is the kind of task I expect AI to excel at. It might at least currently be on the cognitive level of an overconfident 6yo in many regards, but a 6yo with more knowledge than any single person alive. You will still need humans for a good while to sanity check the output and for the bigger picture though.

p-e-w 4y ago
> You will still need humans for a good while to sanity check the output Did you read the story? We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round. And while this is an anecdote, it is by no means an isolated incident. Human professionals are being outperformed on trivial tasks (note that this was a common complication of a common disease) by chatbots. I'm far more scared by human incompetence than by AI making mistakes.
- gwd 4y ago
  > We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round. On the contrary; we need AIs to "completeness check" the experts, because experts are prone to forget things or have missing knowledge; we need humans to "sanity check" the AIs because current LLMs are insane: mixed in with brilliant pieces of insight are super-obvious mistakes and outright hallucinations.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    Many human professionals are incompetent in ways that go beyond just "missing knowledge". This dramatically understates what a colossal problem incompetence is, and one that AIs don't appear to suffer from in the same way. Already with the current generation of AIs, and their strange mistakes and so-called hallucinations, I'd be hard pressed to say that they are overall worse than human professionals, considering what I've seen from those.

yosito 4y ago

Maybe it's not competing against us, maybe it's doing the things that we shouldn't have to spend our time doing, so that we can free up our time for more valuable pursuits. It's just gonna take us a little bit of time to figure out what those pursuits are.

Zetice 4y ago
Yeah I don’t read this story as an example of how a vet is obsolete, but how a vet can be more effective with assists from LLMs. Enhance not replace! The map is not the territory, so you’ll always want to pair a native with the expert (and the territory here is reality).

datadeft 4y ago

I agree with the technical aspect that ChatGPT can diagnose sickness probably better than humans. The problem is that our current workflows do not allow medical professionals to offload responsibility. I think the best scenario is to include ML models in the diagnosis workflow instead of making humans obsolete.