> What's the difference in the lawsuit scenario if a doctor messes up?
Scale. Doctors and taxi drivers represent several points of limited liability, whereas an AI would be treating (and thus liable for) all patients. If a hospital treats one hundred patients with ten doctors, and one doctor is negligent, then his patients might sue him; some patients seeing other doctors might sue the hospital if they see his hiring as indicative of broader institutional neglect, but they’d have to prove this in a lawsuit. If this happened with a software-based classifier being used at every major hospital, you’re talking about a class action lawsuit including every possible person who was ever misdiagnosed by the software; it’s a much more obvious candidate for a class action because the software company has more money and it was the same thing happening every time, whereas a doctor’s neglect or incompetence is not necessarily indicative of broader neglect or incompetence at an institutional level.
> If there's no regulatory blocks, then I don't see how it doesn't ultimately just become a cost comparison.
To make a fair comparison you’d have to look at how many more people are getting successful interventions due to the AI decreasing the cost of diagnosis.
Scale. Doctors and taxi drivers represent several points of limited liability, whereas an AI would be treating (and thus liable for) all patients. If a hospital treats one hundred patients with ten doctors, and one doctor is negligent, then his patients might sue him; some patients seeing other doctors might sue the hospital if they see his hiring as indicative of broader institutional neglect, but they’d have to prove this in a lawsuit. If this happened with a software-based classifier being used at every major hospital, you’re talking about a class action lawsuit including every possible person who was ever misdiagnosed by the software; it’s a much more obvious candidate for a class action because the software company has more money and it was the same thing happening every time, whereas a doctor’s neglect or incompetence is not necessarily indicative of broader neglect or incompetence at an institutional level.
> If there's no regulatory blocks, then I don't see how it doesn't ultimately just become a cost comparison.
To make a fair comparison you’d have to look at how many more people are getting successful interventions due to the AI decreasing the cost of diagnosis.