Hacker News Reader

Comment by dontreact | Hacker News Reader

I would respond that A.I is the -only- realistic hope we have for reducing the biases in our medical system. The systemic and individual level bias of the medical system is not going to go away due to some sudden enlightenment. It’s true to that to some extent the first wave of AI applications will inevitably carry with them some of the biases that exist in the current medical system.

These biases are going to lead to measurably disparate outcomes. Fortunately measurably disparate outcomes are exactly the type of thing that can be used to train or otherwise guide the improvement of a machine learning model.

As long as we have mindfulness that there will be similar biases in the first wave of applications, AI and the typical associated data slicing and dicing that is done when doing model development will be the best tools for detecting and then mitigating these biases.

View on HN

> I would respond that A.I is the -only- realistic hope we have for reducing the biases in our medical system.

I would counter that the only realistic hope is social change. A.I. or not, biases will persist in medicine as long as they persist in society at large. The idea that an unbiased A.I. will arise from a process designed and run by biased individuals sounds like utopianism. Technology is not magic and it won't solve our "hard" social problems for us.

Yeah really!

There's plenty of evidence that medicine today has deeply embedded biases. Disparities in Black maternal health outcomes have been thoroughly covered in the literature and even mainstream media.

On the other hand there's plenty of evidence that ML and AI magnify inequality in other areas.

So relying on technology as a magic bullet to solve these societal problems seems ... naive.

We should work hard to minimize bias in society but given that they tend to arise spontaneously (see the Robber's Cave experiment) I don't hold out any hope of ever actually eliminating them. And some biases, such as lookism, might be too deeply wired for us to have any hope of eliminating.

Evidence based medicine with standardized treatment protocols and checklists provides a realistic hope for reducing the biases in our medical system.

How long has the medical system been trying this sort of thing? Therefore how close are we to the limits of how much bias we can eliminate?

It seems like there are few places where we are not using evidence based medicine. Standardized treatment protocols/checklists are already being pushed and applied as much as possible. The people who don’t want to do it are not likely to do it. In some sense AI based decision assistants are doing evidence based medicine and standardizing treatment protocols, just doing it in places where simpler flowcharts or checklists would be inadequate.

The medical system has been trying this sort of thing for decades but evidence based medicine had only become a major focus relatively recently. And it is working, but you can't expect fast changes in a complex system.

I don't think it's possible to quantify the limits of bias we can eliminate. But the system is moving in the right direction. And AI isn't really required for most of this work; it can provide improvements in some areas but simpler statistical techniques are usually good enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com