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When AI Botches Your Medical Diagnosis, Who's To Blame? (qz.com)
Robert Hart has posed an interested question in his report on Quartz: When artificial intelligence botches your medical diagnosis, who's to blame? Do you blame the AI, designer or organization? It's just one of many questions popping up and starting to be seriously pondered by experts as artificial intelligence and automation continue to become more entwined into our daily lives. From the report: The prospect of being diagnosed by an AI might feel foreign and impersonal at first, but what if you were told that a robot physician was more likely to give you a correct diagnosis? Medical error is currently the third leading cause of death in the U.S., and as many as one in six patients in the British NHS receive incorrect diagnoses. With statistics like these, it's unsurprising that researchers at Johns Hopkins University believe diagnostic errors to be "the next frontier for patient safety." Of course, there are downsides. AI raises profound questions regarding medical responsibility. Usually when something goes wrong, it is a fairly straightforward matter to determine blame. A misdiagnosis, for instance, would likely be the responsibility of the presiding physician. A faulty machine or medical device that harms a patient would likely see the manufacturer or operator held to account. What would this mean for an AI?
Remember the story a few months back on Slashdot about the girl who was held hostage in a hospital, and separated from her parents, because they said she was being given the wrong treatment by her parents due to a misdiagnosis? It'd be pretty difficult for an AI to one-up the evils intentionally committed by humans in the medical industry. Sure it might've been incompetence at first (child abuse is more likely than a super-rare disease) but after a point it was all CYA. Medical malpractice happens all the time, and there are tons of cases of "small-town doctor misdiagnoses rare affliction he'd never seen, patient suffers for it" that never hit the news, yet an AI might never make that mistake. This is why assistants following a flowchart are less likely to misdiagnose than a doctor; we're just replacing the "human reading a flowchart" with a computer program that speeds up the process.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If true then going to the doctor results in a 67% chance of proper treatment and possible survival vs. no going which will be 100% fatal.
Otherwise you're correct, but third biggest killer in this case doesn't mean 33%, but something between 0.3-0.6% of yearly hospital visits. In other words, one patient out of 200-300 dies because of misdiagnosis, the rest actually survive the ordeal, and some may even regain their health...