I understand the consensus at large is no, but what if they could be used for, say, administrative purposes, or some other task which, though not unimportant, might be considered trivial compared to, say, surgery or assessments?
Just a thought.
Also, in addition to whether such technology should be used, do you believe it to be inevitable in any case?
To be sure, I’m not advocating for or against it, merely curious what other people’s opinions are and why they hold such opinions on this potentially inevitable subject
I work in the non-LLM biomed space, and there’s a lot of cool stuff happening! Off the top of my head:
- Vision assistance for pathology: Lots of time is spent by trained professionals scrolling a microscope lens over a slide looking for a needle in a haystack. Having tools that can act as a second set of eyes to flag needles a human might miss is a gamechanger.
- Segmentation for neurosurgery, radiology, RadOnc: Lots of time is spent measuring the size and shape of organs on CTs and MRIs, to track changes, to plan where to cut during surgery, and to map out tumor targets for radiation therapy. We now have tools that work kinda like the magic wand in photoshop, where you wave your mouse around the margins of an anatomical structure on a 2D image slice and the computer can map out the full shape in 3D.
- Automated bone age scans: these studies are commonly carried out to assess for developmental + endocrine abnormalities, and in some legal cases involving identity disputes. There’s solid commercial work towards fully automating these studies in a reliable manner.
The main issue? They are too unreliable for even the most basic tasks. Therefore, it will lead to deaths.
Can you elaborate? I mean, we’ve had deaths in surgery for as long as surgery has existed, why would AI be different (better or worse?) thanks
You’re absolutely right, that’s on me — I wrote 100mg when I should have written 100ug. I made a catastrophic error that resulted in a patient’s death. I’ve updated my agents.txt file so this will never happen again, unless it does.
What were calling AI doesn’t “know” anything. It takes in data, and it spits out other data based on probabilities within a database.
Every AI system’s mker is very direct in saying that their system makes mistakes.
Humans, on the other hand, learn.
I understand that. But what about an administrative role? Like, for example, organising a database in that context?
Administrative roles still can result in things like the wrong mediation being administered or an important procedure being rejected.
Fair point. So you believe that the inclusion of AI, even in these roles, would be more harmful?
YES
They already design systems that give predictable results and those are complicated and require constant upkeep as things chsnge over time. These systems still have issuee.
AI would be worse than that.
Llm models can not run a vending machine business, what makes you think can do medial related stuff?
No, I don’t know. That’s why I was asking, I’m interested but I don’t know in particular depth is all
There is no mechanism for accountability or even auditing decision. We can’t put the unaccountable in charge of life and death.
But isn’t that like saying ‘we can’t hold the dog owner responsible for the dog ripping the child to death’? Surely whoever oversees the AI is accountable? (I’m not really up on AI law tbf)
We do hold the dog owner accountable.
We’ve never held the AI creator or operator responsible.If we started holding people meaningful accountable for the AI stuff, we’d probably stop seeing it used so much.
But also, you wouldn’t put a dog in charge of decisions about someone’s life.
But also, you wouldn’t put a dog in charge of decisions about someone’s life
No of course not, I was just drawing a comparison on responsibility is all.
As for the AI stuff, good point. Do you think that the reason we don’t hold them accountable is so that AI doesn’t get reduced?
Nobody wants to be accountable. AI let’s people hold accountability at arm’s length, because nobody is forcing the person responsible for the decision to use AI to be accountable for the decisions of that AI. It’s a positive feedback loop, where everyone involved in AI benefits from the lack of accountability, regardless of actual outcomes.
People underestimate how important good administration is. Anesthialogists saved a lot of lives by creating a consistant process to be followed. Processes. Procedures. that comes from administration.
And I 100% agree. The problem I see is that others simply don’t see it that way: they lack that knowledge/ability to see/scrutinise that deep. Now combine that trait with greed of money and a desire for/to pay fewer workers, and you have the perfect recipe for an AI replacement in that area. Again, not saying that it’s good, just that it’s potentially inevitable.
I mean the most ai can do is being a smart input field, although I’d prefer the devs to actually put in the work and allow e.g. comma or semicolon separation
So does this (sort of) prove the concept at least?
I think so.
