The singularity is near.
Researchers from Tsinghua University have created a virtual hospital in which all the doctors, nurses and patients are AI-powered avatars capable of autonomous interaction. They simulate the end-to-end process of consultation, examination, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.
According to the Global Times: “AI doctors can treat 10,000 patients in just a few days. It would take human doctors at least two years to treat that many patients. Furthermore, evolved doctor agents achieved an impressive 93.06 percent accuracy rate on the MedQA dataset covering major respiratory diseases.”
This begs the question of how accurate human doctors are in comparison; but that might miss the point. It’s not so much about the accuracy of a one-off diagnosis, as it is about the accuracy of 10,000 diagnoses in just a few days – complicated by the pressures and stresses that such a demand would entail.
Amid the ongoing discourse about the robots stealing our jobs, I feel an important observation that’s missing is our ever-growing need to use artificial intelligence just to keep up.
And I don’t necessarily mean in China where treating many thousands of patients is a realistic challenge. In my home town of Sydney for example, our emergency departments are overloaded, our airport melts down over the holidays, while our property-obsessed population overwhelms banks with mortgage applications.
Perhaps if the fast robots can process 80% of the workload for us, then we slow humans can focus on the 20% that warrants the scrutiny.
Of course, we’ve been down this road before. A similar fear of computers accompanied their emergence in the late 20th Century; and while they impacted jobs, I can’t imagine modern society functioning without them.
As our volumes continue to rise, the same may be said for AI.
