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by MattGaiser 70 days ago
> I have no reason to expect this technology can succeed at the same level in law, medicine, or any other highly human, highly subjective occupation.

I mean, if anything, I would expect it to help bring structure to medicine, which is an often sloppy profession killing somewhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people a year through mistakes and out of date practices.

As medicine is currently very subjective. As a scientific field in the realm of physical sciences, it shouldn't be.

2 comments

I was just talking to some friends in medicine the other day. They are getting more and more AI stuff and they love it.

Just basic stuff like smart dictation that listens to the conversation the practitioner is having and auto creates the medical notes, letters, prescriptions etc saving them time and effort to type that all up themselves etc. They were saying that obviously they have to check everything but it was (and I quote) "scarily perfectly accurate". Freeing up a bunch of their time to actually be with the patient and not have to spend time typing etc.

It's way beyond dictation. Medics I know (fresh postgraduates who used LLMs to help write their R code for statistical analysis for their research) are starting to treat it as one of their peers for domain reasoning, e.g. for discussing whether the conditions for a heart transplant are met. They're indeed in the "wow, this thing is human-like" stage, just not in the "let's delegate to the super brain, and then rubber-stamp the result at the end if it looks good" one we seem to be in... perhaps yet.
This is the crazy part with LLMs. It knows much more than you as a single user will ever realize, as it only shows the part that matches with what you put in.

I was building a tool to do exploratory data analysis. The data is manufacturing stuff (data from 10s of factories, having low level sensor data, human enrichments, all the way up to pre-agregated OEE performance KPIs). I didn't even have to give it any documentation on how the factories work - it just knew from the data what it was dealing with and it is very accurate to the extent I can evaluate. People who actually know the domain are raving about it.

I wouldn’t trust a tool that advises people to put glue on pizza to make medical decisions.