Going to a probabilistic system for something that can/should be deterministic sets off a lot of red flags.
I’ve worked medical software packages, specifically a drug interaction checker for hospitals. The system cannot be written like a social media website… it has to fail by default, and only succeed when an exact correct solution was determined. This result must be repeatable given the same inputs. The consequence is people die.
Health and medicine is very far from deterministic. Your drug interaction checker is deterministic because the non-determinism is handled at a higher level (the doctor / patient interaction) in the health care system. Individual patients often respond wildly differently to the same medicine even in the absence of drug interactions.
Similarly the non-determinism in ChatGPT should be handled at a higher level. It can suggest possibilities for diagnosis and treatment, but you should still evaluate those possibilities with the help of a trained physician.
a drug interaction checker can be deterministic, based on a static corpus of drug interaction data
a diagnostic system should not necessarily be deterministic, because it always operates on incomplete data and it necessarily produces estimates of probability as an output
Humans are probabilistic systems?! You might want to inform the world's top neuroscientists and philosophers to down tools. They were STILL trying to figure this out but you've already solved it! Well done.
I don't think it's a naive response. Perhaps it's obvious to you that human doctors can't produce an "exact correct solution", but quite a lot of people do expect this, and get frustrated when a doctor can't tell them exactly what's wrong with them or recommends a treatment that doesn't end up working.
There's nothing naive about it. Most doctors work off of statistics and probabilities stemming from population based studies. Literally the entire field of medicine is probabilistic and that's what angers people. Yes, 95% chance you're not suffering from something horrible but a lot of people would want to continue diagnostics to rule out that 5% that you now have cancer and the doctor sent you home with antibiotics thinking it's just some infection, or whatever.
Despite this, given that health care prices in the USA continue to accelerate from relentless government interference and regulation, perhaps if the deterministic side of things could be figured out, we could monumentally decrease cost and increase access.
I’ve worked medical software packages, specifically a drug interaction checker for hospitals. The system cannot be written like a social media website… it has to fail by default, and only succeed when an exact correct solution was determined. This result must be repeatable given the same inputs. The consequence is people die.