Years ago, I worked at a company which made a machine to screen pap smear slides. Granted, that much of the insanity in health care is about regulatory power, law, and money, but even so, people were just weird about algorithmic screening.
The machine was much more accurate than the great mass of labs in the country.
But no matter how accurate automated screening was when compared to manual screening, there was always such a tizzy about any algorithmic faults. The fact that manual screening produces many more such faults was simply glossed over. Human faults were invisible and accepted, machine faults were a catastrophe.
From that Future of Life conference: if self-driving cars take over and cut the death rate from car accidents from 32000 to 16000 per year, the makers won’t get 16000 thank-you cards—they’ll get 16000 lawsuits.
Real world example.
Years ago, I worked at a company which made a machine to screen pap smear slides. Granted, that much of the insanity in health care is about regulatory power, law, and money, but even so, people were just weird about algorithmic screening.
The machine was much more accurate than the great mass of labs in the country.
But no matter how accurate automated screening was when compared to manual screening, there was always such a tizzy about any algorithmic faults. The fact that manual screening produces many more such faults was simply glossed over. Human faults were invisible and accepted, machine faults were a catastrophe.
From that Future of Life conference: if self-driving cars take over and cut the death rate from car accidents from 32000 to 16000 per year, the makers won’t get 16000 thank-you cards—they’ll get 16000 lawsuits.