AI Is Going To Take Over Being Doctors For Poor People?
In a flippant remark, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for the creation of ChatGPT, said that he believes that AI has the potential to give medical advice to individuals who cannot afford healthcare.
Technology is becoming more and more embedded in our daily life, and the newest piece of technology to hit everyday people is artificial intelligence (AI). So much so there is talk of having AIs as doctors.
One of the most popular AI at the moment is the AI chatbot ChatGPT. While it has been banned in many schools for doing the kid’s homework, it is known sometimes to get things wrong and make up stuff. This is something that must have come from ChatGPT’s company, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman.
Sam Altman, who is taking a leaf out of Elon Musk’s page, is known for saying wild and ridiculous things such as letting everyone know he is a doomsday prepper as he is worried about AIs (see IRobot) or virus apocalypse (see I Am Legend) or calling ChatGPT a horrible product. This may be true, but you do not publically say that as the company’s commander and chief.
This weekend saw another snippet into Altman’s wonderful train of thought and excellent ideas on how AI could help relieve the pressure crippling the American healthcare system. He thinks that AI doctors could give medical advice to people who cannot afford to see a medical professional. It is bad enough that people have the internet; who tells you you’re dying every time you google a small system; people do not need to be told that by a robot.
While it may be true that AI will become more and more integrated into our daily lives, his AI platform will have to get a lot better before it can be used to truly diagnose people with ailments or problems. There are plenty of reasons that can be used as to why a platform like ChatGPT could not be used to get medical advice. The main one is that it is wrong quite a lot of the time.
AI doctors are so far off it is silly to bring them up. He needs to teach his AI the capital of France first before it starts diagnosing rashes on people. While some errors from AI could be put down to getting mixed up or not understanding grammar correctly, even still, would you want a doctor that sometimes gets confused or has a limited understanding of grammar to diagnose you?
Our medical practitioners go through an extensive period of medical training and internship before they are given the responsibility of looking after another human, but a semi-knowledgeable AI doctor can waltz in and start providing medical information because of its technology? Thank again. Frankly, Altman’s comments should be taken with a grain of salt at this point.
That said, Altman did state that the AI system that is available right now is not up to scratch and will need time to sort out any kinks in them before we start to rely on them for essential services. Ultimately what more can AI doctors bring to our lives that we do not have already, and if they are so safe, why does the creator of the most popular AI have a doomsday patch of land in Big Sur?
