6 ms·

To answer your question: talking to a human. Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Wh

To answer your question: talking to a human. Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology?

criley2 6mo ago
Technology is on a generational 10,000 year run of non-stop successfully solving human problems.
- sumeno 6mo ago
  and causing them
rowanG077 6mo ago
I would personally vastly, vastly prefer to go to a robot doctor, who diagnoses, treats and nurses me. What exactly do I need from a human here? Except of course being the one making the system.
- ForceBru 6mo ago
  Emotional support. Some human doctors absolutely radiate confidence and a kind of "you're gonna be okay" attitude. For me, this helps a lot. I'm not sure a machine can do this.
  - lukan 6mo ago
    But I hate if the human doctor "radiates confidence" when I know he is not doing the proper scan, because I have to get back with worse symptoms first for him to take it serious. I don't need emotional support from a human doctor. I need the adequate scans and a proper analysis. I am pretty sure that a competent human will be still way better than AI, but AI even now will likely be better than a doctor not really paying attention.
  - rowanG077 6mo ago
    You can hopefully get emotional support from your loved ones. If not a coach seems much more appropriate.
- 8note 6mo ago
  a good human doctor is going to notice things other that just what you are telling them and showing them theyre also going to tell you things other than just what your insurance is agreeing to. a robo doctor will be corrupt in ways that a regular doctor can be held accountable, but without the individual accountability
- laurentiurad 6mo ago
  Good luck to you if the prompt is written by health insurance.
ianbutler 6mo ago
So much of what I know from women in my life is that the human element of medicine is almost a strict negative for them. As a guy it hasn't been much better, but at least doctors listen to me when I say something.
- Shog9 6mo ago
  One of, if not THE biggest challenge in getting treatment is getting past insurance rules designed to deny treatment. This is much, much easier when you're able to convince a doctor (and/or trained medical staff) to argue on your behalf. If you can't get those folks to listen to you, that's probably not gonna happen. You might have to go through several different practices before you find a sympathetic ear. Now replace some / all of those humans with... A machine whose function also needs insurance approval. It's gonna end badly.
  - ianbutler 6mo ago
    Sounds like we need to dismantle and replace this broadly dysfunctional system at multiple points. It's not like the US insurance landscape is anywhere close to the best way of handling healthcare if you look at many places in the world.
    - eueheu 6mo ago
      [flagged]
    - analog31 6mo ago
      I used to think this too. But the past couple of years have soured my taste for "dismantle and replace" of vital institutions. I still think healthcare needs to be reformed, and I hope that insurance will someday be a thing of a past, but I've hung up my chain saw for now.
      - squigz 6mo ago
        This is because "dismantle and replace" (or perhaps in other words, "defunding") is not a serious, viable solution to many of the societal issues we face. Things were ruined slowly. They unfortunately will need to be fixed very slowly too.
david-gpu 6mo ago
The human doesn't need to be as highly trained and paid as a doctor if the human is not performing tasks concordant with that training.
ForceBru 6mo ago
"Human problems can't be solved with technology" is just wrong, unless you have narrower definitions of a "human problem" or "technology". For instance, transportation is a "human problem". It's being successfully solved with such technologies as cars, trains, planes, etc. Growing food at scale is a "human problem" that's being successfully solved by automation. Computing... stuff could be a "human problem" too. It's being successfully solved by computers. If "human problems" are more psychological, then again, you can use the Internet to keep in touch with people, so again technology trying to solve a human problem.
- Eisenstein 6mo ago
  I think you may be misunderstanding the concept of 'human problem'. A human problem is caused by humans, it isn't something like transportation. That is a physics problem. An example of a human problem is cheating; you can't solve cheating with technology. Just add [incentive] after human and it should make more sense.
  - ForceBru 6mo ago
    IMO "human problem" isn't a well-defined concept, so it's not really possible to misunderstand it. I think a "human problem" is a problem that _humans have_: how to move around? (transportation) what to eat? (agriculture, etc) how to prevent cheating? (some kind of surveillance) how to communicate over long distances? (radio, the internet, etc) Sure, some kinds of such "human problems" can be reduced to physics and technology, that's the point. This also doesn't necessarily mean that solutions produced by such reductions are effective: is surveillance good at preventing cheating during exams? Kind of. Does it often fail to catch cheating students? Absolutely. However, indeed, there can be many different (perhaps equally correct) definitions of what a "human problem" is.
AntiUSAbah 6mo ago
One doctor didn't want to give me ritalin, so i went to another one. One was against it, the other one saw it as a good idea. I would love to have real data, real statistics etc.
- phoronixrly 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - calmworm 6mo ago
    You could manipulate or write the input/prompt in a way that would make it recommend any drug you wanted.
    - phoronixrly 6mo ago
      You think that in the country of the war on drugs such a thing will be approved?
      - rrr_oh_man 6mo ago
        They already approve / tolerate offshore call center doctors
  - AntiUSAbah 6mo ago
    Because i actually have real ADHD. I have it so strong, that after I was preparing myself, my work desc, my books everything, i was starring into the books i wanted to learn for 15-30 minutes unable to just start or do anything. With ritalin, i might have this mental block to, but its overcome in a few seconds. I went from a 'nearly/borderline failing grade' to the nearly the best grade in just one year. This changed significantly were I am today.
  - isakmarr 6mo ago
    > Cool. Aren't LLMs already doing all the work that requires focus and intelligence instead of you? So your solution is to outsource thinking and work? That'll work out great in the long run.
educasean 6mo ago
> human problems can't be solved with technology How are you defining technology? How are you defining human problems? Inventions are created to solve human problems, not theoretical problems of fictional universe. Do X-rays, refrigerators, phones and even looms solve problems for nonhumans? Claiming something that sounds deep doesn’t make it an axiom.
spwa4 6mo ago
If you read the study, the whole conclusion is much less spectacular than the article. What the article really pushes happened: patients -> AI -> diagnosis (you know, with a camera, or perhaps a telephone I guess) What REALLY happened patients -> nurse/MD -> text description of symptoms -> MD -> question (as in MD asked a relevant diagnostic question, such as "is this the result of a lung infection?", or "what lab test should I do to check if this is a heart condition or an infection?") -> AI -> answer -> 2 MDs (to verify/score) vs patients -> nurse/MD -> text description of symptoms -> MD -> question -> (same or other) MD -> answer -> 2 MDs verify/score the answer Even with that enormous caveat, there's major issues: 1) The AI was NOT attempting to "diagnose" in the doctor House sense. The AI was attempting to follow published diagnostic guidelines as perfectly as possible. A right answer by the AI was the AI following MDs advice, a published process, NOT the AI reasoning it's way to what was wrong with the patient. 2) The MD with AI support was NOT more accurate (better score but NOT statistically significant, hence not) than just the MD by himself. However it was very much a nurse or MD taking the symptoms and an MD pre-digesting the data for to the AI. 3) Diagnoses were correct in the sense that it followed diagnostic standards, as judged afterwards by other MDs. NOT in the sense that it was tested on a patient and actually helped a live patient (in fact there were no patients directly involved in the study at all) If you think about it in most patients even treating MDs don't know the correct conclusion. They saw the patient come in, they took a course of action (probably wrote at best half of it down), and the situation of the patient changed. And we repeat this cycle until patient goes back out, either vertically or horizontally. Hopefully vertically. And before you say "let's solve that" keep in mind that a healthy human is only healthy in the sense that their body has the situation under control. Your immune system is fighting 1000 kinds of bacteria, and 10 or so viruses right now, when you're very healthy. There are also problems that developed during your life (scars, ripped and not-perfectly fixed blood vessels, muscle damage, bone cracks, parts of your circulatory system having way too much pressure, wounds, things that you managed to insert through your skin leaking stuff into your body (splinters, insects, parasites, ...), 20 cancers attempting to spread (depends on age, but even a 5 year old will have some of that), food that you really shouldn't have eaten, etc, etc, etc). If you go to the emergency room, the point is not to fix all problems. The point is to get your body out of the worsening cycle. This immediately calls up the concern that this is from doctor reports. In practice, of course, maybe the AI only performs "better" because a real doctor walked up to the patient and checked something for himself, then didn't write it down. What you can perhaps claim this study says is that in the right circumstances AIs can perform better at following a MD's instructions under time and other pressure than an actual MD can.
djeastm 6mo ago
>Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Humans (doctors/nurses) can still be there to make you feel the warmth of humanity in your darkest times, but if a machine is going to perform better at diagnosing (or perhaps someday performing surgery), then I want the machine. Even now, I'll take a surgeon that's a complete jerk over a nice surgeon any day, because if they've got that job even as a jerk they've got to be good at their jobs. I want results. I'll handle hurt feelings some other time.
- lukko 6mo ago
  I'd be a little bit careful here - being a jerk is quite different to non-conformity / red sneaker effect in surgery and it is not a quality you should look for. The truly compassionate surgeons will want to improve their skills because they care about their patients. They care if they develop complications and may feel terrible if they do, the jerk may not. Being a jerk may mean that the surgeon can rise to the top, but it may not be due to surgical skill at all, they may be better at navigating politics etc.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  I haven't known doctors or nurses to be very warm and fuzzy. I have known them to have real world experience in seeing the outcomes of their actions instead of... Dude you removed my right thumb I was in for an appendectomy!? You are so right! I ignored everything you asked for. I am so sorry. I am administering general anesthesia now, then I will prepare you for your next surgery.
- n8henrie 6mo ago
  > Even now, I'll take a surgeon that's a complete jerk over a nice surgeon any day, because if they've got that job even as a jerk they've got to be good at their jobs. This seems like an incredibly poor line of reasoning. Hospitals are often desperate for surgeons. The poorly mannered ones are often deeply unsatisfied, angry at the grueling lives they've opted into, and the hospitals can't replace them. The market is not exactly at work here.
jamiequint 6mo ago
This is extreme cope.
ddosmax556 6mo ago
I think there's a real space there, and a lot of what e.g. nurses and doctors do is talking to humans, and that won't go away. But two facts are also true: a) diagnosis itself can be automated. A lot of what goes on between you having an achy belly and you getting diagnosed with x y or z is happening outside of a direct interaction with you - all of that can be augmented with AI. And b), the human interaction part is lacking a great deal in most societies. Homeopathy and a lot of alternative medicine from what I can see has its footing in society simply because they're better at talking to people. AI could also help with that, both in direct communication with humans, but also in simply making a lot of processes a lot cheaper, and maybe e.g. making the required education to become a human facing medicinal professional less of a hurdle. Diagnosis becomes cheaper & easier -> more time to actually talk to patients, and more diagnosises made with higher accuracy.
- prmph 6mo ago
  > Diagnosis becomes cheaper & easier -> more time to actually talk to patients Unfortunately is this not likely to happen. More like: Diagnosis becomes cheaper & easier -> more patients a doctor is expected to see in the same period of time as before
  - NiloCK 6mo ago
    What's unfortunate about that?
    - prmph 6mo ago
      It is unfortunate because churning through patients quickly without actually listening to them well leads to worse outcomes
ipaddr 6mo ago
Doctors are not necessarily great at talking to patients and patients are unhappy with the information Doctors provide. This moat has dried up.
- phoronixrly 6mo ago
  If you prefer an LLM to a human doctor, you deserve an LLM instead of a human doctor, and I wish you get it.
  - eueheu 6mo ago
    Free markets and all that right? Ok fellas put your money where your mouth is. It’s easy to talk until you put your money behind it (or lack of by getting rid of spending on it) if you are so confident in doctor as a service by llm.
    - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
      Sign sam altman and his family up first. What's good for the flock...
    - p1esk 6mo ago
      I’ve been using llm as my personal pcp for 3 years now. I’m extremely pleased with the results.
  - ipaddr 6mo ago
    I would use one for sure. Much of medicine is getting tests / labs booked fighting to get certain medicines. Doctors will barely give you 5 minutes only deal with one issue per visit, rarely are available and going into an office can make you sicker. An llm with Doctor powers could offer more. I don't think we are at the surgery point but we are past getting notes and medicine's refilled.
    - n8henrie 6mo ago
      So why not order your own labs? I'm sure you can think of ways to get your own medications if you are sufficiently convinced that this is the best course of action for your health.
csomar 6mo ago
Doctors talk to patients? I know. I know. Part of it is that talking to patients on average is useless but still this can’t be really used for an argument against AI. Still doctors can have a more broad picture of the situation since they can look at the patient as a whole; something the LLM can’t really synthesize in its context.
- NeutralCrane 6mo ago
  There’s really nothing preventing an LLM from having the context a doctor does. The two avenues of context gathering by the doctor are: - looking at their medical history/charts - asking follow up questions An LLM based system is trivially capable of doing both of those.
  - zbentley 6mo ago
    > looking at their medical history/charts I think you'd be incredibly surprised how often charts are super, super incomplete or wrong. Like "pt has no pancreas and presented with pain and weeping from a 6yo pancreatectomy scar" but the chart doesn't mention the surgery or the entire missing organ wrong. Like "pt is a twin whose sibling died traumatically of cancer in front of them a year ago and presents with probable hypochondria about cancer" but the chart doesn't mention any family history wrong. Like "lifelong history of severe cognitive impairment substantiated by a psych eval; attended annual physical before being sent to imaging for head trauma because of observed impairment" but the chart doesn't mention cognition (someone was too polite to note it) nor the psych eval (records sharing wasn't allowed) wrong. Those are a very few examples off the top of my head. I worked in EMR. I don't know shit about medicine, but man, do I know a lot about the complaints physicians and their staff send when they think it's the records system's fault that the chart was wrong or missing info. In a big chunk of cases, the MD/NP/whatever's in-person role is determining what's not on the chart so that they can then ask appropriate follow-up questions. Given the massive range of possible dx for a given issue, and how much of getting the right dx doesn't have to do with probabilities/numbers of similar patients with the same symptom:dx data that'd be in the training set, I have major doubt that an LLM can appropriately intuit or appropriately question in order to diagnose.
idopmstuff 6mo ago
It seems likely to me that doctors whose job is almost or entirely about making diagnoses and prescribing treatments won't be able to keep up in the long run, where those who are more patient facing will still be around even after AI is better than us at just about everything. If I were picking a specialty now, I'd go with pediatrics or psychiatry over something like oncology.
- malfist 6mo ago
  AI is always good enough to replace the other guy's job.
- laurentiurad 6mo ago
  You are confusing the job with a subset of tasks. Some tasks can be automated, some won't. That doesn't mean LLMs, which cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry, will replace anyone.
  - palmotea 6mo ago
    > That doesn't mean LLMs, which cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry, will replace anyone. But most of us live in America in 2026. There are a lot of interests that don't give a shit about you who would love if you to got your medical care from a machine that "cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry". And there a lot of useful idiots with no real medical issues who will loudly claim the machine is great.
    - laurentiurad 6mo ago
      I cannot agree more. Useful idiots and people working in private equity which have a direct financial interest to hype this tech.
  - idopmstuff 6mo ago
    I'm not. I understand the difference and also that through improvements to the core models as well as harnesses, LLMs are able to handle an increasing share of tasks. I also understand that these things will continue to improve until AI can automate entire jobs. You, on the other hand, are confusing LLMs from the past with current SOTA LLMs, which can tell how many rs are in strawberry.
2ndorderthought 6mo ago
[flagged]
- inquirerGeneral 6mo ago
  [dead]
singpolyma3 6mo ago
Yes talking to a human is good and necessary. But for diagnostics humans are not good at it. I'm happy for to human to use a tricorder and then tell me the answer.
elif 6mo ago
LLMs are a distillation of human.
- n8henrie 6mo ago
  Human language that is.
ethin 6mo ago
Because people believe that they know everything about humans and how they work (or they hedge it). This is the exact same reason I don't trust supposed "experts" claiming AI will replace all these jobs: those same experts have no idea what these jobs actually entail and just look at the job title (and maybe the description) but have not once actually worked those jobs. And there is a huge chasm between "You read the job description" and "you actually know what it is like to be in this position and you fully understand everything that goes into it".
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
p1esk 6mo ago
I cannot wait until doctors are fully automated. Shouldn’t be long now, hopefully just a few years.
- laurentiurad 6mo ago
  next year bro, I promise, now give me 60 billion more in funding
skeptic_ai 6mo ago
You have 2 options A) nice chatty friendly and cool doctor and can diagnose correctly 50% of the times. B) robotic ai that diagnoses 60% correctly. What you chose? If you have a disease than can kill your, the ai is 20% more likely to help you and probably prevent. I can’t see too many people choosing human doctor. Anyway I’m sure there will be people that will chose doctor with 10% correctness vs a 100% ai no matter what. I time is clear there very little human element.
Culonavirus 6mo ago
Yeah... No. I can't possibly disagree with this view more. I don't need to "talk to a human", I need a problem with my meatbag resolved. > humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology WTF are you talking about? Is this bait? You can't possibly mean this. Yes humans are social creatures, but what does that have to do with medicine? Are you talking about a priest, a witch doctor, a therapist? Because if you're not, that sentence is utter BS.
scotty79 6mo ago
In psychotherapy patients tend to prefer talking to AI than a human therapist and rank the interaction higher.
- palmotea 6mo ago
  > In psychotherapy patients tend to prefer talking to AI than a human therapist and rank the interaction higher. Even if your statement is true, it's questionable. People also tend to prefer hearing what they want to hear to hearing what they need to hear, and rank the former interaction higher. Basically, tech's favorite feedback mechanism, customer reviews, cannot actually be relied upon to tell you how good something is.
smohare 6mo ago
[dead]
balamatom 6mo ago
>Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology? Perhaps because they have been persistently failed by other humans, but not by technology; and/or because they believe they don't have the right and/or capability to improve other humans, but may be able to improve the technology? For complex human reasons, I am effectively deprived of healthcare, in a country where healthcare is socialized. Other services provided by the state are also gatekept by my nominal healthcare provider, making certain "normal" things, indeed things that are required of me in order to participate in society, technically impossible. (I will not go into concrete detail, because when I request help from anyone with my situation, the "help" consists of implorations to comply with painful nonsense, combined with a random helping of rudeness and idiocy. Yes, we exist.) If I had "open source" access to just the "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching" that is presumably still involved in medical practice besides this nebulous "talking to a human" (which the other human usually actively works to make impossible, having been fundamentally socialized into language use by means of violence - and thus, the more intelligent my interlocutor, the more quickly they begin to feel threatened by understanding what I'm talking about), I would be able to maintain my body to a better standard than the standard of care that the institutional medical establishment has kindly deigned to make available to me. Meanwhile, I don't even have "open source" access to the designs of the motor vehicle which hauls said body around. Being a car mechanic is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", too - it's being a part of a web of trust and tacit collusion; a.k.a. a guild. Come to think of it, I don't even have "open source" access to the internals of the device I'm writing this from. Though at least in the domain of computing there are valiant attempts to produce libre software and hardware. I'm happy that "talking to a human" has helped you. In my case, requesting help has a >10% likelihood to endanger my life, >25% to imperil my health, and >50% to degrade my sanity. Rough ballpark, eh? A fully "open source" OS, device, vehicle, body, and mind, would presumably allow me to solve my immediate problems without needing other humans to perform the inexpicably painful sacrifice of comprehending my communications. Without access to these basics, consent to "healthcare" is impossible; we just put our lives in the hands of the medical technopriesthood and hope they don't leave us with permanently crossed fingers.

criley2 6mo ago

Technology is on a generational 10,000 year run of non-stop successfully solving human problems.

sumeno 6mo ago
and causing them

rowanG077 6mo ago

I would personally vastly, vastly prefer to go to a robot doctor, who diagnoses, treats and nurses me. What exactly do I need from a human here? Except of course being the one making the system.

ForceBru 6mo ago
Emotional support. Some human doctors absolutely radiate confidence and a kind of "you're gonna be okay" attitude. For me, this helps a lot. I'm not sure a machine can do this.
- lukan 6mo ago
  But I hate if the human doctor "radiates confidence" when I know he is not doing the proper scan, because I have to get back with worse symptoms first for him to take it serious. I don't need emotional support from a human doctor. I need the adequate scans and a proper analysis. I am pretty sure that a competent human will be still way better than AI, but AI even now will likely be better than a doctor not really paying attention.
- rowanG077 6mo ago
  You can hopefully get emotional support from your loved ones. If not a coach seems much more appropriate.
8note 6mo ago
a good human doctor is going to notice things other that just what you are telling them and showing them theyre also going to tell you things other than just what your insurance is agreeing to. a robo doctor will be corrupt in ways that a regular doctor can be held accountable, but without the individual accountability
laurentiurad 6mo ago
Good luck to you if the prompt is written by health insurance.

ianbutler 6mo ago

So much of what I know from women in my life is that the human element of medicine is almost a strict negative for them. As a guy it hasn't been much better, but at least doctors listen to me when I say something.

Shog9 6mo ago
One of, if not THE biggest challenge in getting treatment is getting past insurance rules designed to deny treatment. This is much, much easier when you're able to convince a doctor (and/or trained medical staff) to argue on your behalf. If you can't get those folks to listen to you, that's probably not gonna happen. You might have to go through several different practices before you find a sympathetic ear. Now replace some / all of those humans with... A machine whose function also needs insurance approval. It's gonna end badly.
- ianbutler 6mo ago
  Sounds like we need to dismantle and replace this broadly dysfunctional system at multiple points. It's not like the US insurance landscape is anywhere close to the best way of handling healthcare if you look at many places in the world.
  - eueheu 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  - analog31 6mo ago
    I used to think this too. But the past couple of years have soured my taste for "dismantle and replace" of vital institutions. I still think healthcare needs to be reformed, and I hope that insurance will someday be a thing of a past, but I've hung up my chain saw for now.
    - squigz 6mo ago
      This is because "dismantle and replace" (or perhaps in other words, "defunding") is not a serious, viable solution to many of the societal issues we face. Things were ruined slowly. They unfortunately will need to be fixed very slowly too.

david-gpu 6mo ago

The human doesn't need to be as highly trained and paid as a doctor if the human is not performing tasks concordant with that training.

ForceBru 6mo ago

"Human problems can't be solved with technology" is just wrong, unless you have narrower definitions of a "human problem" or "technology". For instance, transportation is a "human problem". It's being successfully solved with such technologies as cars, trains, planes, etc. Growing food at scale is a "human problem" that's being successfully solved by automation. Computing... stuff could be a "human problem" too. It's being successfully solved by computers. If "human problems" are more psychological, then again, you can use the Internet to keep in touch with people, so again technology trying to solve a human problem.

Eisenstein 6mo ago
I think you may be misunderstanding the concept of 'human problem'. A human problem is caused by humans, it isn't something like transportation. That is a physics problem. An example of a human problem is cheating; you can't solve cheating with technology. Just add [incentive] after human and it should make more sense.
- ForceBru 6mo ago
  IMO "human problem" isn't a well-defined concept, so it's not really possible to misunderstand it. I think a "human problem" is a problem that _humans have_: how to move around? (transportation) what to eat? (agriculture, etc) how to prevent cheating? (some kind of surveillance) how to communicate over long distances? (radio, the internet, etc) Sure, some kinds of such "human problems" can be reduced to physics and technology, that's the point. This also doesn't necessarily mean that solutions produced by such reductions are effective: is surveillance good at preventing cheating during exams? Kind of. Does it often fail to catch cheating students? Absolutely. However, indeed, there can be many different (perhaps equally correct) definitions of what a "human problem" is.

AntiUSAbah 6mo ago

One doctor didn't want to give me ritalin, so i went to another one. One was against it, the other one saw it as a good idea. I would love to have real data, real statistics etc.

phoronixrly 6mo ago
[flagged]
- calmworm 6mo ago
  You could manipulate or write the input/prompt in a way that would make it recommend any drug you wanted.
  - phoronixrly 6mo ago
    You think that in the country of the war on drugs such a thing will be approved?
    - rrr_oh_man 6mo ago
      They already approve / tolerate offshore call center doctors
- AntiUSAbah 6mo ago
  Because i actually have real ADHD. I have it so strong, that after I was preparing myself, my work desc, my books everything, i was starring into the books i wanted to learn for 15-30 minutes unable to just start or do anything. With ritalin, i might have this mental block to, but its overcome in a few seconds. I went from a 'nearly/borderline failing grade' to the nearly the best grade in just one year. This changed significantly were I am today.
- isakmarr 6mo ago
  > Cool. Aren't LLMs already doing all the work that requires focus and intelligence instead of you? So your solution is to outsource thinking and work? That'll work out great in the long run.

educasean 6mo ago

> human problems can't be solved with technology How are you defining technology? How are you defining human problems? Inventions are created to solve human problems, not theoretical problems of fictional universe. Do X-rays, refrigerators, phones and even looms solve problems for nonhumans? Claiming something that sounds deep doesn’t make it an axiom.

spwa4 6mo ago

If you read the study, the whole conclusion is much less spectacular than the article. What the article really pushes happened: patients -> AI -> diagnosis (you know, with a camera, or perhaps a telephone I guess) What REALLY happened patients -> nurse/MD -> text description of symptoms -> MD -> question (as in MD asked a relevant diagnostic question, such as "is this the result of a lung infection?", or "what lab test should I do to check if this is a heart condition or an infection?") -> AI -> answer -> 2 MDs (to verify/score) vs patients -> nurse/MD -> text description of symptoms -> MD -> question -> (same or other) MD -> answer -> 2 MDs verify/score the answer Even with that enormous caveat, there's major issues: 1) The AI was NOT attempting to "diagnose" in the doctor House sense. The AI was attempting to follow published diagnostic guidelines as perfectly as possible. A right answer by the AI was the AI following MDs advice, a published process, NOT the AI reasoning it's way to what was wrong with the patient. 2) The MD with AI support was NOT more accurate (better score but NOT statistically significant, hence not) than just the MD by himself. However it was very much a nurse or MD taking the symptoms and an MD pre-digesting the data for to the AI. 3) Diagnoses were correct in the sense that it followed diagnostic standards, as judged afterwards by other MDs. NOT in the sense that it was tested on a patient and actually helped a live patient (in fact there were no patients directly involved in the study at all) If you think about it in most patients even treating MDs don't know the correct conclusion. They saw the patient come in, they took a course of action (probably wrote at best half of it down), and the situation of the patient changed. And we repeat this cycle until patient goes back out, either vertically or horizontally. Hopefully vertically. And before you say "let's solve that" keep in mind that a healthy human is only healthy in the sense that their body has the situation under control. Your immune system is fighting 1000 kinds of bacteria, and 10 or so viruses right now, when you're very healthy. There are also problems that developed during your life (scars, ripped and not-perfectly fixed blood vessels, muscle damage, bone cracks, parts of your circulatory system having way too much pressure, wounds, things that you managed to insert through your skin leaking stuff into your body (splinters, insects, parasites, ...), 20 cancers attempting to spread (depends on age, but even a 5 year old will have some of that), food that you really shouldn't have eaten, etc, etc, etc). If you go to the emergency room, the point is not to fix all problems. The point is to get your body out of the worsening cycle. This immediately calls up the concern that this is from doctor reports. In practice, of course, maybe the AI only performs "better" because a real doctor walked up to the patient and checked something for himself, then didn't write it down. What you can perhaps claim this study says is that in the right circumstances AIs can perform better at following a MD's instructions under time and other pressure than an actual MD can.

djeastm 6mo ago

>Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Humans (doctors/nurses) can still be there to make you feel the warmth of humanity in your darkest times, but if a machine is going to perform better at diagnosing (or perhaps someday performing surgery), then I want the machine. Even now, I'll take a surgeon that's a complete jerk over a nice surgeon any day, because if they've got that job even as a jerk they've got to be good at their jobs. I want results. I'll handle hurt feelings some other time.

lukko 6mo ago
I'd be a little bit careful here - being a jerk is quite different to non-conformity / red sneaker effect in surgery and it is not a quality you should look for. The truly compassionate surgeons will want to improve their skills because they care about their patients. They care if they develop complications and may feel terrible if they do, the jerk may not. Being a jerk may mean that the surgeon can rise to the top, but it may not be due to surgical skill at all, they may be better at navigating politics etc.
2ndorderthought 6mo ago
I haven't known doctors or nurses to be very warm and fuzzy. I have known them to have real world experience in seeing the outcomes of their actions instead of... Dude you removed my right thumb I was in for an appendectomy!? You are so right! I ignored everything you asked for. I am so sorry. I am administering general anesthesia now, then I will prepare you for your next surgery.
n8henrie 6mo ago
> Even now, I'll take a surgeon that's a complete jerk over a nice surgeon any day, because if they've got that job even as a jerk they've got to be good at their jobs. This seems like an incredibly poor line of reasoning. Hospitals are often desperate for surgeons. The poorly mannered ones are often deeply unsatisfied, angry at the grueling lives they've opted into, and the hospitals can't replace them. The market is not exactly at work here.

jamiequint 6mo ago

This is extreme cope.

ddosmax556 6mo ago

I think there's a real space there, and a lot of what e.g. nurses and doctors do is talking to humans, and that won't go away. But two facts are also true: a) diagnosis itself can be automated. A lot of what goes on between you having an achy belly and you getting diagnosed with x y or z is happening outside of a direct interaction with you - all of that can be augmented with AI. And b), the human interaction part is lacking a great deal in most societies. Homeopathy and a lot of alternative medicine from what I can see has its footing in society simply because they're better at talking to people. AI could also help with that, both in direct communication with humans, but also in simply making a lot of processes a lot cheaper, and maybe e.g. making the required education to become a human facing medicinal professional less of a hurdle. Diagnosis becomes cheaper & easier -> more time to actually talk to patients, and more diagnosises made with higher accuracy.

prmph 6mo ago
> Diagnosis becomes cheaper & easier -> more time to actually talk to patients Unfortunately is this not likely to happen. More like: Diagnosis becomes cheaper & easier -> more patients a doctor is expected to see in the same period of time as before
- NiloCK 6mo ago
  What's unfortunate about that?
  - prmph 6mo ago
    It is unfortunate because churning through patients quickly without actually listening to them well leads to worse outcomes

ipaddr 6mo ago

Doctors are not necessarily great at talking to patients and patients are unhappy with the information Doctors provide. This moat has dried up.

phoronixrly 6mo ago
If you prefer an LLM to a human doctor, you deserve an LLM instead of a human doctor, and I wish you get it.
- eueheu 6mo ago
  Free markets and all that right? Ok fellas put your money where your mouth is. It’s easy to talk until you put your money behind it (or lack of by getting rid of spending on it) if you are so confident in doctor as a service by llm.
  - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
    Sign sam altman and his family up first. What's good for the flock...
  - p1esk 6mo ago
    I’ve been using llm as my personal pcp for 3 years now. I’m extremely pleased with the results.
- ipaddr 6mo ago
  I would use one for sure. Much of medicine is getting tests / labs booked fighting to get certain medicines. Doctors will barely give you 5 minutes only deal with one issue per visit, rarely are available and going into an office can make you sicker. An llm with Doctor powers could offer more. I don't think we are at the surgery point but we are past getting notes and medicine's refilled.
  - n8henrie 6mo ago
    So why not order your own labs? I'm sure you can think of ways to get your own medications if you are sufficiently convinced that this is the best course of action for your health.

csomar 6mo ago

Doctors talk to patients? I know. I know. Part of it is that talking to patients on average is useless but still this can’t be really used for an argument against AI. Still doctors can have a more broad picture of the situation since they can look at the patient as a whole; something the LLM can’t really synthesize in its context.

NeutralCrane 6mo ago
There’s really nothing preventing an LLM from having the context a doctor does. The two avenues of context gathering by the doctor are: - looking at their medical history/charts - asking follow up questions An LLM based system is trivially capable of doing both of those.
- zbentley 6mo ago
  > looking at their medical history/charts I think you'd be incredibly surprised how often charts are super, super incomplete or wrong. Like "pt has no pancreas and presented with pain and weeping from a 6yo pancreatectomy scar" but the chart doesn't mention the surgery or the entire missing organ wrong. Like "pt is a twin whose sibling died traumatically of cancer in front of them a year ago and presents with probable hypochondria about cancer" but the chart doesn't mention any family history wrong. Like "lifelong history of severe cognitive impairment substantiated by a psych eval; attended annual physical before being sent to imaging for head trauma because of observed impairment" but the chart doesn't mention cognition (someone was too polite to note it) nor the psych eval (records sharing wasn't allowed) wrong. Those are a very few examples off the top of my head. I worked in EMR. I don't know shit about medicine, but man, do I know a lot about the complaints physicians and their staff send when they think it's the records system's fault that the chart was wrong or missing info. In a big chunk of cases, the MD/NP/whatever's in-person role is determining what's not on the chart so that they can then ask appropriate follow-up questions. Given the massive range of possible dx for a given issue, and how much of getting the right dx doesn't have to do with probabilities/numbers of similar patients with the same symptom:dx data that'd be in the training set, I have major doubt that an LLM can appropriately intuit or appropriately question in order to diagnose.

idopmstuff 6mo ago

It seems likely to me that doctors whose job is almost or entirely about making diagnoses and prescribing treatments won't be able to keep up in the long run, where those who are more patient facing will still be around even after AI is better than us at just about everything. If I were picking a specialty now, I'd go with pediatrics or psychiatry over something like oncology.

malfist 6mo ago
AI is always good enough to replace the other guy's job.
laurentiurad 6mo ago
You are confusing the job with a subset of tasks. Some tasks can be automated, some won't. That doesn't mean LLMs, which cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry, will replace anyone.
- palmotea 6mo ago
  > That doesn't mean LLMs, which cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry, will replace anyone. But most of us live in America in 2026. There are a lot of interests that don't give a shit about you who would love if you to got your medical care from a machine that "cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry". And there a lot of useful idiots with no real medical issues who will loudly claim the machine is great.
  - laurentiurad 6mo ago
    I cannot agree more. Useful idiots and people working in private equity which have a direct financial interest to hype this tech.
- idopmstuff 6mo ago
  I'm not. I understand the difference and also that through improvements to the core models as well as harnesses, LLMs are able to handle an increasing share of tasks. I also understand that these things will continue to improve until AI can automate entire jobs. You, on the other hand, are confusing LLMs from the past with current SOTA LLMs, which can tell how many rs are in strawberry.

2ndorderthought 6mo ago

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inquirerGeneral 6mo ago
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singpolyma3 6mo ago

Yes talking to a human is good and necessary. But for diagnostics humans are not good at it. I'm happy for to human to use a tricorder and then tell me the answer.

elif 6mo ago

LLMs are a distillation of human.

n8henrie 6mo ago
Human language that is.

ethin 6mo ago

Because people believe that they know everything about humans and how they work (or they hedge it). This is the exact same reason I don't trust supposed "experts" claiming AI will replace all these jobs: those same experts have no idea what these jobs actually entail and just look at the job title (and maybe the description) but have not once actually worked those jobs. And there is a huge chasm between "You read the job description" and "you actually know what it is like to be in this position and you fully understand everything that goes into it".

deleted 6mo ago

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p1esk 6mo ago

I cannot wait until doctors are fully automated. Shouldn’t be long now, hopefully just a few years.

laurentiurad 6mo ago
next year bro, I promise, now give me 60 billion more in funding

skeptic_ai 6mo ago

You have 2 options A) nice chatty friendly and cool doctor and can diagnose correctly 50% of the times. B) robotic ai that diagnoses 60% correctly. What you chose? If you have a disease than can kill your, the ai is 20% more likely to help you and probably prevent. I can’t see too many people choosing human doctor. Anyway I’m sure there will be people that will chose doctor with 10% correctness vs a 100% ai no matter what. I time is clear there very little human element.

Culonavirus 6mo ago

Yeah... No. I can't possibly disagree with this view more. I don't need to "talk to a human", I need a problem with my meatbag resolved. > humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology WTF are you talking about? Is this bait? You can't possibly mean this. Yes humans are social creatures, but what does that have to do with medicine? Are you talking about a priest, a witch doctor, a therapist? Because if you're not, that sentence is utter BS.

scotty79 6mo ago

In psychotherapy patients tend to prefer talking to AI than a human therapist and rank the interaction higher.

palmotea 6mo ago
> In psychotherapy patients tend to prefer talking to AI than a human therapist and rank the interaction higher. Even if your statement is true, it's questionable. People also tend to prefer hearing what they want to hear to hearing what they need to hear, and rank the former interaction higher. Basically, tech's favorite feedback mechanism, customer reviews, cannot actually be relied upon to tell you how good something is.

smohare 6mo ago

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balamatom 6mo ago

>Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology? Perhaps because they have been persistently failed by other humans, but not by technology; and/or because they believe they don't have the right and/or capability to improve other humans, but may be able to improve the technology? For complex human reasons, I am effectively deprived of healthcare, in a country where healthcare is socialized. Other services provided by the state are also gatekept by my nominal healthcare provider, making certain "normal" things, indeed things that are required of me in order to participate in society, technically impossible. (I will not go into concrete detail, because when I request help from anyone with my situation, the "help" consists of implorations to comply with painful nonsense, combined with a random helping of rudeness and idiocy. Yes, we exist.) If I had "open source" access to just the "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching" that is presumably still involved in medical practice besides this nebulous "talking to a human" (which the other human usually actively works to make impossible, having been fundamentally socialized into language use by means of violence - and thus, the more intelligent my interlocutor, the more quickly they begin to feel threatened by understanding what I'm talking about), I would be able to maintain my body to a better standard than the standard of care that the institutional medical establishment has kindly deigned to make available to me. Meanwhile, I don't even have "open source" access to the designs of the motor vehicle which hauls said body around. Being a car mechanic is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", too - it's being a part of a web of trust and tacit collusion; a.k.a. a guild. Come to think of it, I don't even have "open source" access to the internals of the device I'm writing this from. Though at least in the domain of computing there are valiant attempts to produce libre software and hardware. I'm happy that "talking to a human" has helped you. In my case, requesting help has a >10% likelihood to endanger my life, >25% to imperil my health, and >50% to degrade my sanity. Rough ballpark, eh? A fully "open source" OS, device, vehicle, body, and mind, would presumably allow me to solve my immediate problems without needing other humans to perform the inexpicably painful sacrifice of comprehending my communications. Without access to these basics, consent to "healthcare" is impossible; we just put our lives in the hands of the medical technopriesthood and hope they don't leave us with permanently crossed fingers.