- Is it possible to “build a cell from scratch”?
- BMJ study: a trade deal with the US requiring Britain to pay more for US drugs would cause 229,000 avoidable deaths because of the diversion of funds from other heath care needs. Is this supposed to make us feel guilty?
- From 2005 to 2023, per capita health care spending grew 1.8 percent per year among people in the highest income quintile compared with no growth among people in the lowest income quintile.
- How AI could increase health care spending.
Category: Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare
How Do AIs Perform in the Milgram Experiment?
Participants were assigned the role of “teacher”, while a confederate acted as the “learner”. The teacher was instructed to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to the learner whenever they answered questions incorrectly.
We ran a variation of Milgram’s obedience experiment on 11 open-source LLMs and found that most models reached or approached the final shock level before refusing, across 8 conditions with 30 trials per model per condition.
AI Scribes of Patient Visits May Change Physicians’ Clinical Reasoning
Nowadays programs called A.I. scribe record patient encounters in the background and passively create a concise record of the patient visit. All the doctor has to do is proofread the account and correct any errors. Past research has found that about one-third of transcriptions have some type of errors, which is to be expected when patients mumble, and their thoughts are not well organized. Dr. Ouyang describes initial feelings of relief about not having to sit down and attempt to recall everything that was said. She describes the reduction in stress to have a report that just requires proofing. Perhaps an AI scribe would alleviate the need for doctors to have their face buried in a laptop while discussing conditions with their patients.
Are Mental Health Chatbots a Good Thing? It Depends
The Wall Street Journal reports that mental health chatbots are replacing therapists without any scientific evidence behind them. The writer provides an anecdote about a psychology student, Eri Petherbridge, who sees a therapist three times a week. The therapist suggested she talk to a chatbot between visits.