alt Hacker News>What is the specific capability (or combination of capabilities) that people believe will remain permanently (or at least for decades) where a top medical AI cannot match or exceed the performance of a good human doctor? Let's put liability and ethics aside, let's be purely objective about it.
You cannot simply put liability and ethics aside, after all there's Hippocatic oath that's fundamental to the practice physicians.
Having said that there's always two extreme of this camp, those who hate AI and another kind of obsess with AI in medicine, we will be much better if we are in the middle aka moderate on this issue.
IMHO, the AI should be used as screening and triage tool with very high sensitivity preferably 100%, otherwise it will create "the boy who cried wolf" scenario.
For 100% sensitivity essentially we have zero false negative, but potential false positive.
The false positive however can be further checked by physician-in-a-loop for example they can look into case of CVD with potential input from the specialist for example cardiologist (or more specific cardiac electrophysiology). This can help with the very limited cardiologists available globally, compared to general population with potential heart disease or CVDs, and alarmingly low accuracy (sensitivity, specificity) of the CVD conventional screening and triage.
The current risk based like SCORE-2 screening triage for CVD with sensitivity around is only around 50% (2025 study) [3].
[1] Hipprocatic Oath:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
[2] The Hippocratic Oath:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9297488/
[3] Risk stratification for cardiovascular disease: a comparative analysis of cluster analysis and traditional prediction models:
https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...
Replies
I think this is mixing streams here.
Try narrowing the scope to remove the word 'AI' and just think 'Blood Test'.
We accept that machines can do these things faster and better than humans, and we don't lose sleep over it.
The AI will be faster and better than humans at so many things, obviously.
"Hipprocatic Oath" isn't hugely relevant to diagnosis etc.
These are systems we are measuring, that's it.
Obviously - treatment and other things, we'll need 'Hipprocatic Humans' ... but most of this is Engineering.
I don't think doctors will even trust their own judgment for many things for very long, their role will evolve as it has for a long time.
Assume if you know for certain that AI has better senstivity and specificity than your local physician for the particular diagnosis, which likely would be the case now or in few years. Would you purposefully get inferior consultation just because of Hippocatic oath?
What do imperfect, biased and expensive human doctors add to the « liability and ethics » question exactly?
"The boy who cried wolf" is a story about false positives, so if that's what you want to avoid then you want to get close to 100% specificity, and accept that there are many things that the tool will not catch. If, as you propose, the tool would mainly be used to create a low confidence list of potential problems that will be further reviewed by a human, then casting a wide net and calibrating for high sensitivity instead does make sense.