Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Technology is amazing. From The Economist: Fourteen years ago, Melanie Reid, a journalist, fell off a horse and broke her neck. The injury to her spinal cord left her paralysed, limiting the function of her four limbs and torso—a condition known as tetraplegia. For more than a decade her left hand was incapable of either…
People won’t be surprised to learn that AI could improve the accuracy of diagnosis, expedite the rates of drug discovery, or even replace some (or many) activities typically done by doctors. However, can AI save the health care system money? That is the question asked by a recent article in The Economist titled “Can artificial…
You’re mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better. And actually it will, I think, by itself degrade actually. If you look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt and they’re able to make the…
HT: Marginal Revolution.
Do patients prefer AI or physician responses to their questions. Based on a study in JAMA Internal Medicine by Ayers et al (2023), the answer is AI: Of the 195 questions and responses, evaluators preferred chatbot responses to physician responses in 78.6% (95% CI, 75.0%-81.8%) of the 585 evaluations… Chatbot responses were rated of significantly…
Victoria Krakovna of LessWrong provides some examples where artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms didn’t work out exactly as planned. In fact, she has put together a master list of these AI issues. Below I have listed some of these examples that are more (or less) related to health: Cancer. AI trained to classify skin lesions as…
From an interesting article in Scientific American: When we look back on the past 175 years, the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a central domain of both scientific and technical advances. Techno-scientific innovations have sometimes delivered on their promises and sometimes not. Of the biggest advances, three really did change our lives—probably…
In the past I have written about the limited evidence that wellness program work. So we should see that employers are abandoning these programs or at least scaling back? According to one recent study, however employers are actually increasing investments in wellness programs. The study surveys employers from over 500 companies with more than 100…
Interesting article on how human intelligence and artificial intelligence can be seen as complements rather than substitutes. Human+AI combinations have been shown to perform better than human or AI alone. Why? AIs are best at choosing answers. Humans are best at choosing questions. The advent of AI is not a zero sum game. The symbiotic…
Interesting video from Wired on how artificial intelligence (AI) software may help improve patient care in the future.