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

Reply to comment by TemetN in How soon will people be confortable with being treated only by machines, as opposed to AI-assisted human medical doctors? by Aromatic_Highlight27

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).