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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Betting against AI has been a winning play since the history of AI. AI isn't any closer to replacing a human doctor today than it was in the 1980's. Maybe some day, but we're talking fundamental breakthroughs in the field, not incremental advances from existing techniques.

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True, but look at the timeline for your daughter. Assuming she was recently born, and, given that few from a school like Penn would want to be a rural family physician, assuming she's going into an elite specialty (cardiology, neurology, oncology, etc), she's THREE DECADES away from getting started in her line of work. And that's a generous projection. More likely, she'll need to be hyperspecialized, an expert in some obscure niche area like cancers of the eye, in which case she would need more and more education, and I doubt Google's engineers are going to just chill out and wait for her.

Not trying to be a downer here. I'd rather the world have more aspiring doctors than talent agents, but let's also respect the march of progress, and acknowledge the cruel fate of all that stands in its way.

I understand the point your making, and I don't disagree with you, but let's say I'm skeptical of Google's ability to do anything other than help my find my porn more easily. AI has just been such a miserable failure for decades. Indeed, Google's big advancement came from incorporating human intelligence (encoding in the graph of links between pages) into the search process! I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but rather that it's like manned missions to mars. Always just 20 years away...

As an aside, being a rural doctor is amazing. They're in very short supply, and therefore the salaries are correspondingly quite high.

"since the history of AI" <-- lol. This could be said about any recent technology with a short history.... electronics in your pocket, for example

AI peaked and declined when most people here were small children.

It doesn't seem like you know very much about modern AI work. Watson was on Jeopardy two years ago.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI

Watson is not AI. It can't reason. It's a very big, very fast search engine with access to a ton of documents. It's not based on any theoretical breakthroughs, just the natural advancements in computing power. It's very useful, but something that can't reason isn't going to create the sea-change people think will come out of AI, and Watson doesn't get us any closer to that goal than we were decades ago.

I'll give an example. Google's search engine has been a hugely successful application of certain AI concepts. But it is not AI. It can use the link structure of the web to help you find documents, but it could not, for example, recreate the link structure between a set of documents.

Well, you can call it whatever you like. But, I'd certainly prefer google self-driving car to a taxicab with a human driver. And I don't see how is that much different from a robot performing a routine operation by the way. So here goes these surgeon jobs, alongside with the cab drivers.

...no, you wouldn't. It is untested in plenty of environments right now, and being able to drive around Palo Alto guided without killing anyone is nice but not nearly enough.

One day, of course, it'll be amazing and safe. But AI has a history of its promising advances being perpetually pushed to the future.

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