Oz is such an absolute fucking moron. Robots won’t be doing the procedures on people, OBGYNs will be doing them through telerobotics. It’s a human using a tool, not a robot.
I imagine more like with x-rays. You’ll have a tech doing the procedure, and automation to guide the tech and interpret results. The results will be emailed to a remote ob/gyn, who will hopefully actually look instead of blindly believing ai slop. Hopefully they can do this with quick enough turnaround to respond to any issues but I’m not optimistic
Yep, that’s the headline. They get it right in the body text, but either some kid or AI wrote the headline, I guess. Journalism died 15 years ago, and the body is starting to stink.
Oz said there are no OB-GYNs in most Alabama counties, “so they’re doing something pretty cool. They’re actually having robots do ultrasounds on these pregnant moms.”
“No, Dr. Oz. It is not ‘cool’ that we don’t have OBGYN’s in many rural counties in America. It is an international embarrassment,” Sanders wrote in a post on the social platform X. “In the richest country on earth, we need more doctors, nurses, dentists and mental health counselors, not more robots.”
What do you mean?? Are you suggesting the article DOESNT tell us that [sic] “robots performing ultrasounds in Alabama”?
see, it’s this kind of thoughtless bullshit that really highlights the problems with AI and the reckless glee with which it is embraced and stuffed into just about any role, but especially with professional fields like medicine. I don’t have a problem with AI (or even robots) in general, but I see its obvious shortcomings currently. AI can’t replicate the human nuance that is so important with providing good medical care-- and that’s ignoring the fact that AI still isn’t even close to the accuracy and ingenuity of human medical professionals in diagnoses and treatments, especially when the presentation isn’t “textbook” or involves multiple conditions. And, even then, it must constantly be checked for accuracy by real human medical professionals, ultimately negating any “improvement” in performance or outcome.
But the worst part, as Sanders highlights, isn’t so much that medical procedures might soon be performed by AI/robots, it’s the fact that such a thing is even necessary due to Alabama experiencing a massive shortage of OB?GYNs. THAT is the very bad part. And worse? rather than do anything to try to get more doctors (which requires massive and long-term investments in education), AI techbros only care about how they can make money on this by hawking their product as a fix to the rapid deterioration of our education system.
due to Alabama experiencing a massive shortage of OB?GYNs.
Turns out doctors don’t want to practice where they’re not wanted. Who could possibly have seen that coming?
Or stop criminalizing reproductive health care.
Not “or“. This also needs to happen, but Alabama already had a serious lack of qualified OB/GYNs. While things like this, make it worse, the underlying issue in Alabama is both the terrible education system, and a serious lack of good paying opportunities that would attract more qualified doctors to the area.
A lot of educated professional people are NOT eager to live in a “race to the bottom” type of place. Without serious attention to massive quality of life improvements, you couldn’t pay me enough
Exactly, AI could be a very helpful and powerful tool with the potential to do some really good things, but it’s still a tool not a replacement for an education and common sense. We’re all being intentionally dumbed down by dumb people who have been handed way too much power because nepotism. They’ve accomplished so much destruction (success?) by just acting overly confident, and pretending they knew what they were doing. It’s only recently that people have started saying out loud what I think many of us were probably silently screaming in our heads, but waiting on somebody else to be the first one to say: “For the love of God, just put it down and back away.”
Calculators are useful tools, but imagine how fucking dumb the world would be if we all just collectively agreed nobody needs to learn math anymore because we have calculators that do that.
GPS navigation is a useful tool, but it doesn’t mean you should blindly follow the instructions it gives when it tells you to turn into a brick wall or a body of water.
I’m not sure if it’s a recent liability thing in medicine, or maybe because my insurance requires I go to a giant monopoly to remain in network, but it seems like over the last year, most doctors have had it hammered into their heads that AI should be the first and only step they take when diagnosing a patient. Not that it should be a tool to augment human capabilities, not that it’s what you turn to for help when you can’t figure out what’s going on, or even what you consult to double check your own conclusions.
The old saying is “treat the patient not the symptoms” but it feels like suddenly it’s become policy to treat every patient like a checklist of symptoms in a diagnosis box.
That literally only makes sense for a computer making a diagnosis based on the sum of check marks in each box reaching a predetermined cut off value. That could be a useful way to prescreen people or streamline treatment for simple things like diagnosing a cold/flu, but when a patient has persistent symptoms, but only checks one or two symptoms in a lot of random boxes that don’t tally up to meet any predetermined cut off value for a single diagnosis, wtf does the computer do at that point? What is the next step for this patient who is begging for help only to be told, sorry, that doesn’t check off enough symptoms in any one box for me to be able to diagnose you.
🤷♀️ is also literally the answer when the doctor is unable (or maybe not allowed due to policy) to think critically and evaluate the information available in the context of the patient vs a predetermined diagnostic screener somebody else created.
Anytime I hear “we can just fill it in with AI” I feel like we’re closer and closer to Idiocracy becoming a reality, but it feels especially close when it comes to medicine. It’s like somebody saw this scene and didn’t get that it was supposed to be a joke, not something we aspire to:
“These funds will go to empowering rural hospitals, strengthening their workforce, modernizing facilities and technology, and ensuring that rural Americans get world-class health care in their own community, right smack in their own community, like they’ve never had it before,” Trump said. The fund will not make direct payments to rural hospitals but to states that filed for the “rural health transformation plans” with Oz.
Guess we learned nothing from the PPP.
Working as designed.
