4 ms·

Doctors are technicians. Technicians with a large toolkit, but technicians nonetheless. When you compare their behaviors to IT it all starts making sense.

by mpsprd 3y ago

talonx 3y ago
Add to that the fact that experience matters a lot too. The more variety of cases a doctor sees, the more the chances are that their diagnosis is going to be useful.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  Yes and no, the more a doctor sees a particular diagnosis the less likely they are to consider anything else. Honestly of all the professions that could be enhanced by AI, medicine has the most to gain. An AI can remember a much larger data set than any human and look for correlations among many more dimensions.
  - xbmcuser 3y ago
    Yes that's what I think as well. And it's sad that medical data being weaponized against you is the thing that takes more sound bytes than how medical data collection can improve diagnosis and healthcare. But with the way medical industry, insurance industry etc are we cant blame people for worrying about data collection specially in a country like the US where you can become destitute without medical insurance
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    The great thing is even LLMs who only take text input still can yield better results than doctors. Think about a healthcare system which utilizes transformers working on images etc.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Being a doctor is like debugging a unique humongous software application with thousands of years of organic patchwork added by a godlike AI which just generates random code and watches the failed experiments die, no source code to any of it just the final binary, no debugger that lets you kill the process and dump its memory or trace its execution, just a bunch of test cases that cost lots of money to run and may yield false positives and false negatives making every bug some sort of heisenbug which may or may not show up when you try to reproduce it and reduces you to guessing with some percentage of certainty fuzzy logic, and even if you do manage to figure anything out in your desperate attempt to fix it you're reduced to essentially inserting event objects into the software's internal event system and hoping it produces the desired effects as it circulates throughout the entire system while hoping it won't adversely affect anything else and it's not even guaranteed to make anything better, or alternatively you pry the program open very carefully while it's running and cut code sections which grew tumorous or stitch together other sections which are leaking precious data or remodel the pipes so the data flows more efficiently, all to hopefully fix the problem while praying to god your attempt to fix it didn't actually make it worse because some malware randomly made it into the program while you worked on it.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  thats why i majored in biomed engineering but stopped short of going into medical school a lot of the 'magic' around being human evaporates when you have to quantify the 'worth' of any particular organ untangling this closed-source blob always reveals secrets: 2023 just had an update to anatomy! https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/newly-discovered-anatomy-shields-and-monitors-brain https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/newly-discovered-a...
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Not only that but you need to provide expertise more on the timelines of a customer support agent rather than a software developer or researcher.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Yeah. It's like a never ending stream of bug reports coming in constantly and you have like ten minutes to make sense of each and every one amidst that chaos and do something about all of it because if you don't there isn't gonna be enough time to see them all and the godlike AI's operating system is gonna start killing the buggiest of the processes assigned to you before you've even figured out what's wrong and when that happens the report is closed forever and there's nothing you can do anymore. The same bugs show up in the programs over and over again every single day and there's no permanent solution, no permanent fix at the source code level that would end the suffering of all of those programs. Just constant swimming against the current. You don't even fully understand the system you're trying to fix, it's like ancient technology left to you by a long gone alien civilization and the best you can do is reverse engineer bits and pieces of it from the outside in and top down so you can do some very educated guesswork based on research that's way too expensive to be reproduced or replicated in any way, research that doesn't produce exact predictions like physics but rather purely statistical statements like "in case of A associated with conditions B if you do C you'll fix D% of the programs". Everything is framed like this, everything, you're never fully certain, everything has risk, there's even a chance the research you're basing all of this on is just completely made up or tainted by conflicts of interest or something equally stupid.
  - 3y ago
fnordpiglet 3y ago
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Doesn’t have quite the same applicability. I imagine quite a lot of medical issues could be solved if reboots were simpler.

Doctors are technicians. Technicians with a large toolkit, but technicians nonetheless. When you compare their behaviors to IT it all starts making sense.

by mpsprd 3y ago

Doctors are technicians. Technicians with a large toolkit, but technicians nonetheless. When you compare their behaviors to IT it all starts making sense.

talonx 3y ago

Add to that the fact that experience matters a lot too. The more variety of cases a doctor sees, the more the chances are that their diagnosis is going to be useful.

Turskarama 3y ago
Yes and no, the more a doctor sees a particular diagnosis the less likely they are to consider anything else. Honestly of all the professions that could be enhanced by AI, medicine has the most to gain. An AI can remember a much larger data set than any human and look for correlations among many more dimensions.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  Yes that's what I think as well. And it's sad that medical data being weaponized against you is the thing that takes more sound bytes than how medical data collection can improve diagnosis and healthcare. But with the way medical industry, insurance industry etc are we cant blame people for worrying about data collection specially in a country like the US where you can become destitute without medical insurance
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  The great thing is even LLMs who only take text input still can yield better results than doctors. Think about a healthcare system which utilizes transformers working on images etc.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Being a doctor is like debugging a unique humongous software application with thousands of years of organic patchwork added by a godlike AI which just generates random code and watches the failed experiments die, no source code to any of it just the final binary, no debugger that lets you kill the process and dump its memory or trace its execution, just a bunch of test cases that cost lots of money to run and may yield false positives and false negatives making every bug some sort of heisenbug which may or may not show up when you try to reproduce it and reduces you to guessing with some percentage of certainty fuzzy logic, and even if you do manage to figure anything out in your desperate attempt to fix it you're reduced to essentially inserting event objects into the software's internal event system and hoping it produces the desired effects as it circulates throughout the entire system while hoping it won't adversely affect anything else and it's not even guaranteed to make anything better, or alternatively you pry the program open very carefully while it's running and cut code sections which grew tumorous or stitch together other sections which are leaking precious data or remodel the pipes so the data flows more efficiently, all to hopefully fix the problem while praying to god your attempt to fix it didn't actually make it worse because some malware randomly made it into the program while you worked on it.

jareklupinski 3y ago
thats why i majored in biomed engineering but stopped short of going into medical school a lot of the 'magic' around being human evaporates when you have to quantify the 'worth' of any particular organ untangling this closed-source blob always reveals secrets: 2023 just had an update to anatomy! https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/newly-discovered-anatomy-shields-and-monitors-brain https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/newly-discovered-a...
quickthrower2 3y ago
Not only that but you need to provide expertise more on the timelines of a customer support agent rather than a software developer or researcher.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Yeah. It's like a never ending stream of bug reports coming in constantly and you have like ten minutes to make sense of each and every one amidst that chaos and do something about all of it because if you don't there isn't gonna be enough time to see them all and the godlike AI's operating system is gonna start killing the buggiest of the processes assigned to you before you've even figured out what's wrong and when that happens the report is closed forever and there's nothing you can do anymore. The same bugs show up in the programs over and over again every single day and there's no permanent solution, no permanent fix at the source code level that would end the suffering of all of those programs. Just constant swimming against the current. You don't even fully understand the system you're trying to fix, it's like ancient technology left to you by a long gone alien civilization and the best you can do is reverse engineer bits and pieces of it from the outside in and top down so you can do some very educated guesswork based on research that's way too expensive to be reproduced or replicated in any way, research that doesn't produce exact predictions like physics but rather purely statistical statements like "in case of A associated with conditions B if you do C you'll fix D% of the programs". Everything is framed like this, everything, you're never fully certain, everything has risk, there's even a chance the research you're basing all of this on is just completely made up or tainted by conflicts of interest or something equally stupid.
- 3y ago

fnordpiglet 3y ago

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Doesn’t have quite the same applicability. I imagine quite a lot of medical issues could be solved if reboots were simpler.