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Comment by cbg0 | Hacker News Reader

> Sandra Scott, MD, CEO of the One Brooklyn Health, a small hospital facing tight margins, agreed with this line of thinking, according to Crain’s.

Does this CEO of a small hospital realize that their hospital will take the legal responsibility if there's no doctor to sue for malpractice?

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Speaking of which... when people talk about "replacing" humans with AI, it makes me wonder if there's some kind of law we can push for that says "if you are part of the chain of command that signs off on AI being able to make final determinations, and that causes legal issues, you will be legally liable in place of the AI, since computers cannot be liable." Let a jury decide who, in the chain, bears what burden, case by case, but provide for prima facie liability for all parties in the chain, when a valid suit is tried. I want to see how strong the push is for AI when it's the CEO's personal money on the line.

Honestly yes, you are 100% right that it should be a responsibility thing. I remember back in the day it was said that self-driving car companies would have legal responsibility in case of an accident. I remember that kind of put a damper on the rollout and also took a lot of hype and focus away from the whole industry.

The chain of responsibility must include the AI vendor. If vendors aren't liable for malpractice, there will be less incentive for all due diligence when lives are on the line.

Hospitals already usually pay for malpractice insurance on behalf of the physicians.

They do, but it’s the physician who is personally liable, not the hospital. It’s just another form of compensation.

My wife and I are both physicians. Our house doesn’t belong to either of us, strictly; it belongs to our marriage. You have to have a legal claim against both of us to put it in jeopardy.

This works in the other direction too - a human mises a cancer, that 10 out of 10 radiology models say it's there with 99% confidence. That hospital will lose in court for negligence.

Is this the norm in US courts, evaluating a human's performance against LLMs?

If it is a regular practice of such doctors to use such tools, and that doctor did not, then it is malpractice. That is how malpractice works. You have to fall below the standard of care in a way that proximately caused the damages.

> a human mises a cancer, that 10 out of 10 radiology models say it's there with 99% confidence

I think the cases where judgements differ—either between humans or AI or both–will be the difficult to discern cases, where no human and no LLM will have 99% confidence.

I’m sure there’s a golden parachute somewhere around to save her.

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