TemetN t1_jegw78p wrote on March 31, 2023 at 10:48 PM

Define people I guess? A fifth? Half? Almost all? Like another commenter said, some people are already comfortable, and it's worth a reminder that in certain cases machine surgeons have been shown to outperform human ones. That said, even after that takes off, and ignoring the considerations of how much of the population, a huge amount of comfort will depend on soft factors such as early societal reactions and media.

I do think people will at least start to be comfortable in significant numbers sooner rather than later. Mid 2020s perhaps for enough for it to be relatively common (fifth-ish, enough so to not be shocking), and by 2030 for general acceptance (majority might consider one).

Aromatic_Highlight27 OP t1_jegwpz1 wrote on March 31, 2023 at 10:52 PM

Let's put in another way. How long before it will be legal for a hospital (or a company), say, to make diagnosis and prescribe drugs without human doctors being involved in the process at any point?

TemetN t1_jegy8rk wrote on March 31, 2023 at 11:03 PM

That's an interesting question, but I think it's probably even harder to answer honestly since that's largely a matter of social/cultural change. I'd particularly note how messy and incoherent our drug laws are in America in this case.

In practice I might actually expect something like a pill printer to leave this obsolete rather than it happening in some other way.

Aromatic_Highlight27 OP t1_jegyip1 wrote on March 31, 2023 at 11:05 PM

A pill printer meaning people would be able to manufacture drugs at home? Even ignoring the feasibility, do you think this kind of devices would be legal themselves? Seems even worse than Ai-prescriber to me. Also, do you think this kind of capability will be available by mid 2020s as well?

TemetN t1_jegzdms wrote on March 31, 2023 at 11:12 PM

Basically two things here, the first is that different rules for various products and loopholes mean they could likely pretty much just... sell it until the government did something. Possibly even outright admit what it was doing and the government might have trouble stopping it in the short term.

The second is that I think there'd probably be wholesale resistance to removing humans from the decision making chain in the short/medium term. Don't get me wrong, I actually would generally favor both of these (presuming they were both mature technologies), I just don't think it's going to be technical progress that necessarily slows the AI prescription part (arguably, that might be doable now).