4 ms·

> Why do I have to pay $93 (on top of the cough syrup that costed ~$44) just so that the doctor can see me on Zoom for less than 5 mins and submit an order for

by imiric 1y ago

> Why do I have to pay $93 (on top of the cough syrup that costed ~$44) just so that the doctor can see me on Zoom for less than 5 mins and submit an order for the med? Because you're paying for the expertise of someone who studied for more than a decade which you won't get from a random web search. An AI system with today's technology should be less trustworthy for medical diagnosis than a web search. At least with a web search you might stumble upon a site with content from experts, assuming you trust yourself to be able to discern expert advice from bot-generated and spam content. Even if a doctor is doing the searching instead of me, I would pay them only for their knowledge to make that discernment for me. Why you think an AI could do better than a human at that is beyond me. Your question reminds me of that famous Henry Ford GE invoice story: > Making chalk mark on generator: $1. > Knowing where to make mark: $9,999.

85392_school 1y ago
AI systems have been improving. O3 now has the capability to decide to search multiple times as part of its response.
- creata 1y ago
  Even o4-mini (free) uses web searches and runs Python scripts very eagerly. I'm not sure how long they'll be able to afford giving all of that away.
ChadNauseam 1y ago
You answered why someone would want to pay $93, but not why they have to pay $93.
hiatus 1y ago
There's a limit though right? How about, if you can accurately predict the doctor's diagnosis it's free? If not you pay. This person needed a doctor's approval presumably for a prescription they couldn't get without authorization which leads to this gatekeeping. Not to mention also contributes to the insane medical costs in the US. $93 for 5 minutes is over 1k _an hour_ for what amounts to a rubber stamp (because how much can you really dig into a person's medical history and condition in 5 mins).
wubrr 1y ago
I mean, it really depends on what you're trying to diagnose/do. Yeah, a math PhD might have spent a decade+ studying the subject. Doesn't mean I need to pay for their skills instead of using a calculator/program to solve my math problem. > Why you think an AI could do better than a human at that is beyond me. Why do you think an AI couldn't do better than a human, when we have ample evidence of computers/AI exceeding humans in many areas?
- imiric 1y ago
  > Why do you think an AI couldn't do better than a human, when we have ample evidence of computers/AI exceeding humans in many areas? I was specifically referring to the ability of discerning between accurate content and nonsense. SOTA LLMs today produce nonsensical output themselves, partly due to their training data being from poor quality sources. Cleaning up and validating training data for accuracy is an unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problem. We can't expect AI to do this for us, since this requires judgment from expert humans. And for specific applications such as healthcare, accuracy is not something you can ignore by placing a disclaimer.
  - wubrr 1y ago
    Many human 'experts' produce nonsensical data. Verification of data by humans is also mostly based on 'prior' data. We've had many popular medical practices over the years developed and supported by medical experts which turned out to be completely wrong. The main thing missing right now, imo, is the ability for LLMs to verify data via experimentation, but this is completely solvable.
senordevnyc 1y ago
An AI system with today's technology should be less trustworthy for medical diagnosis than a web search. This is the problem with reasoning from first principles. This statement is easily proven false by giving it a try, whether it "should" be true or not.
hayst4ck 1y ago
I dislike that quote. It's not knowing where to make the mark. It's that there's no one else who knows where to make the mark charging less that $9,999. Knowing where to make the mark implies that payment is proportional to ability/productivity, but it is proportional chiefly to relative positions of power. Learning where to make the mark won't earn you $9,999, it will instead put you in competition with the other $9,999 markers in a downward race to the "true value" of those marks. > Why you think an AI could do better than a human at that is beyond me. You strike me as someone who thinks like me before I started using LLMs. Now when I read things like this rather than thinking in terms of black and white like I might have before, I instead think about percent likelihoods, and once you let in the grey it's no longer a matter of can/cannot but how many resources will be invested into making it so. I think you hold doctors in pretty high esteem and I'm not sure how many other people hold doctors in as high esteem as you do. I've certainly ended up worse for having visited one. How seriously do you think most doctors take continuing education, particularly if they are overworked? An AI can consume the latest research/guidelines/text books immediately. Doctors can often act on 20 year old medical dogma. AI can get immediate social media feedback weighted in a way professionals deem appropriate. I think diagnostic work is one of the things most likely to be taken over by AI. Even when asking specific technical questions in my own field, AI is capable of hitting some key points, and with extra prodding even getting to some very very specific niche points without too much coddling.
- imiric 1y ago
  > You strike me as someone who thinks like me before I started using LLMs. Cool, except I've been using LLMs since their inception, and they're now part of my daily workflow, for better or worse. My opinion is based purely on my experience as a user over the last few years. Besides, my point in that paragraph was specifically about the ability to judge accuracy in information and to produce accurate information, not whether AI can outperform humans in other tasks. Modern AI systems fail miserably at this, which might be acceptable for casual use, but when human lives depend on that accuracy, such as in the healthcare industry, the process of integrating them should be gradual, with a lot of oversight and regulation. We've done that in the automotive industry, for obvious reasons, and the same should be done in others. > I think you hold doctors in pretty high esteem and I'm not sure how many other people hold doctors in as high esteem as you do. We hold the medical profession, not individual doctors, in high esteem for good reasons. It is critical to society, and requires intense education for many years. At the end of the day, doctors are as fallible as any human, but they're required to be licensed, and we have regulations in place for medical malpractice. The idea that a computer system based on probabilities and randomness, that hallucinates most of the time, will be more reliable than the average human doctor is ludicrous, regardless of what some benchmark says. I'm not against using AI in healthcare. Pattern matching to detect early stages of cancer is a very good use case that's been helping radiologists for many years now. But that's the key word: _helping_. My concern is that when these systems are used for medical diagnosis and advice, they will instead be relied on much more than they should be.
resource_waste 1y ago
>Why you think an AI could do better than a human at that is beyond me. AI can take your entire medical history and the entire history of physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine up to May 2025... A human was sleep deprived in Med school 15 years ago.

by imiric 1y ago

85392_school 1y ago

AI systems have been improving. O3 now has the capability to decide to search multiple times as part of its response.

creata 1y ago
Even o4-mini (free) uses web searches and runs Python scripts very eagerly. I'm not sure how long they'll be able to afford giving all of that away.

ChadNauseam 1y ago

You answered why someone would want to pay $93, but not why they have to pay $93.

hiatus 1y ago

There's a limit though right? How about, if you can accurately predict the doctor's diagnosis it's free? If not you pay. This person needed a doctor's approval presumably for a prescription they couldn't get without authorization which leads to this gatekeeping. Not to mention also contributes to the insane medical costs in the US. $93 for 5 minutes is over 1k _an hour_ for what amounts to a rubber stamp (because how much can you really dig into a person's medical history and condition in 5 mins).

wubrr 1y ago

I mean, it really depends on what you're trying to diagnose/do. Yeah, a math PhD might have spent a decade+ studying the subject. Doesn't mean I need to pay for their skills instead of using a calculator/program to solve my math problem. > Why you think an AI could do better than a human at that is beyond me. Why do you think an AI couldn't do better than a human, when we have ample evidence of computers/AI exceeding humans in many areas?

imiric 1y ago
> Why do you think an AI couldn't do better than a human, when we have ample evidence of computers/AI exceeding humans in many areas? I was specifically referring to the ability of discerning between accurate content and nonsense. SOTA LLMs today produce nonsensical output themselves, partly due to their training data being from poor quality sources. Cleaning up and validating training data for accuracy is an unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problem. We can't expect AI to do this for us, since this requires judgment from expert humans. And for specific applications such as healthcare, accuracy is not something you can ignore by placing a disclaimer.
- wubrr 1y ago
  Many human 'experts' produce nonsensical data. Verification of data by humans is also mostly based on 'prior' data. We've had many popular medical practices over the years developed and supported by medical experts which turned out to be completely wrong. The main thing missing right now, imo, is the ability for LLMs to verify data via experimentation, but this is completely solvable.

senordevnyc 1y ago

An AI system with today's technology should be less trustworthy for medical diagnosis than a web search. This is the problem with reasoning from first principles. This statement is easily proven false by giving it a try, whether it "should" be true or not.

hayst4ck 1y ago

I dislike that quote. It's not knowing where to make the mark. It's that there's no one else who knows where to make the mark charging less that $9,999. Knowing where to make the mark implies that payment is proportional to ability/productivity, but it is proportional chiefly to relative positions of power. Learning where to make the mark won't earn you $9,999, it will instead put you in competition with the other $9,999 markers in a downward race to the "true value" of those marks. > Why you think an AI could do better than a human at that is beyond me. You strike me as someone who thinks like me before I started using LLMs. Now when I read things like this rather than thinking in terms of black and white like I might have before, I instead think about percent likelihoods, and once you let in the grey it's no longer a matter of can/cannot but how many resources will be invested into making it so. I think you hold doctors in pretty high esteem and I'm not sure how many other people hold doctors in as high esteem as you do. I've certainly ended up worse for having visited one. How seriously do you think most doctors take continuing education, particularly if they are overworked? An AI can consume the latest research/guidelines/text books immediately. Doctors can often act on 20 year old medical dogma. AI can get immediate social media feedback weighted in a way professionals deem appropriate. I think diagnostic work is one of the things most likely to be taken over by AI. Even when asking specific technical questions in my own field, AI is capable of hitting some key points, and with extra prodding even getting to some very very specific niche points without too much coddling.

imiric 1y ago
> You strike me as someone who thinks like me before I started using LLMs. Cool, except I've been using LLMs since their inception, and they're now part of my daily workflow, for better or worse. My opinion is based purely on my experience as a user over the last few years. Besides, my point in that paragraph was specifically about the ability to judge accuracy in information and to produce accurate information, not whether AI can outperform humans in other tasks. Modern AI systems fail miserably at this, which might be acceptable for casual use, but when human lives depend on that accuracy, such as in the healthcare industry, the process of integrating them should be gradual, with a lot of oversight and regulation. We've done that in the automotive industry, for obvious reasons, and the same should be done in others. > I think you hold doctors in pretty high esteem and I'm not sure how many other people hold doctors in as high esteem as you do. We hold the medical profession, not individual doctors, in high esteem for good reasons. It is critical to society, and requires intense education for many years. At the end of the day, doctors are as fallible as any human, but they're required to be licensed, and we have regulations in place for medical malpractice. The idea that a computer system based on probabilities and randomness, that hallucinates most of the time, will be more reliable than the average human doctor is ludicrous, regardless of what some benchmark says. I'm not against using AI in healthcare. Pattern matching to detect early stages of cancer is a very good use case that's been helping radiologists for many years now. But that's the key word: _helping_. My concern is that when these systems are used for medical diagnosis and advice, they will instead be relied on much more than they should be.

resource_waste 1y ago

>Why you think an AI could do better than a human at that is beyond me. AI can take your entire medical history and the entire history of physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine up to May 2025... A human was sleep deprived in Med school 15 years ago.