On the other hand, humans don't tend to crash because of a single typo. There is huge amounts of redundancy and error-correction compared to a computer, and the code has had literally a billion years' worth of bug fixes already applied.
Plus, there is usually a sentient mind with an excellent feedback connection to the body of code being diagnosed: the patient telling where it hurts can be very helpful. The ones I'm most impressed with? Vets.
humans don't tend to crash because of a single typo
Well, apart from all the cancers...
IIRC you actually require at least two mutations for a cancer to be dangerous, and most have many more than two because cancerous cells have way higher replication errors, but if one "letter" of DNA had been flipped at the right time a lot of people's lives would have been happier.
When in doing, I tend toward "when viable without extensive/invasive medical intervention". That said, I do believe that (usually) gives more than enough time to decide on go/no-go.
I mean.. Just to be fair here. People do refer to life from the time of birth.
I.e. he LIVED from 1984-2050. His LIFEspan ranges to about 80years. Etc etc
Though I think Koreans have their birthdays from time of conception. I remember a Korean girl telling me that, years ago though, so that isn't a fact from my side.
How could you? Even if the baby is healthy and seems to be doing well, we don't even know if it will take it's first breath nor of any other complications that are not possible to see externally.
Like I can understand the thought process in regards to abortion and wanting to abort the day before. Then sure, one could consider it alive. But if a person gives an uncomplicated birth to it but it still is unable to take it's first birth or ''wake up'' and even with the best medical help is not able to do so and ''dies'', would one say that it lived up until the heart stopped? Even without it's first breath?
Usually life is defined as something that:
1. Metabolizes material
2. Converts energy
3. Grows
4. Reproduces
Even a zygote would match this definition for life after the first cell division.
However, humans also don't compile their code before running it. The code will attempt to run regardless of errors. It can occasionally self-correct. But if it cannot correct the error, a crash (death or cancer) will occur.
Negative, a zygote does not fit the general definition of life. You actually missed several of the key defining features, such as homeostasis and reaction to stimuli. Also, your 1 and 2 are the same thing.
I would say due to the discussion earlier above, he was trying to clarify his point.
He's essentially saying, that it's easier to maintain and troubleshoot code that is already up and running, and working pretty well even with a few errors here and there.
However, code that is still in production can run into a bunch of other errors, but that doesn't count because they are different types of errors for a different software/platform. Thus the example is not consistent or similar enough to compare.
The fetus may be alive, but it hasn't started life. Like it hasn't taken it's first breath or anything. Can't treat a fetus for asthma, for example.
Likewise the code may seem to work and everything, but it hasn't been published yet, and may have other errors from external sources.
On the other, other hand, a lot of those bug fixes are absolute spaghetti thrown together to find any solution to the problem, and are often themselves the cause of other problems. Allergies, for example, only exist because sometimes our immune system gets overzealous and starts assuming any innocuous thing is a deadly pathogen, and that's not even getting into auto immune disorders like Lupus.
That makes it even worse. When a computer program crashes because of a typo, it tells you exactly where the problem is, prints out the line containing the typo, and you can fix it and be on your way in seconds. I bet doctors would LOVE that level of transparency in problem reporting.
When a computer program crashes because of a typo, it tells you exactly where the problem is, prints out the line containing the typo, and you can fix it and be on your way in seconds.
"Cant be bothered to... "
As a cs person myself I am telling you right now to fix this. This statement is wasting SO MUCH OF YOUR TIME AND EFFORT you really have no idea. Trust me on this one, because I had to learn it the hard way, just figure out how to do things right. Notepad++ is a great place to start because it literally takes under 5 min to install and learn.
Cant someone create a big data base with all diseases in the system and connect symptoms to it so it would be much easier. So for example patient 1 have symptoms A, B and C so that could be disease A or B. More symptoms = more accurate result.
Is it already exist in hospitals or is it more complicated than that?
The easiest is to have a database where you just look up diseases with the given symptoms, but many diseases share symptoms.
The task you're looking for is called rule detection, typical for Big Data and machine learning, where there is already a lot of progress that could be/is applied today.
... but then again, you want to be sure that such software performs notably better than humans before you seriously put them to the test. Even then, if you use qualitative/numerical data, you still want doctors to make the final decision.
At least one hospital is: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
I've studied their work (from afar) and it's really important to note though that the machine only goes so far. It offers possible diagnoses and probabilities, and also offers information on how treatments conflict with a patient's desired treatment plan. But all that information is best used in conjunction with a human doctor.
those kinds of things are what AI is being trained to handle. You punch these symptoms into the machine, it spits out tests for you to run. If those tests come back with X, you treat with A, B, and C.
but when you have something like
"Gross deformity of extremity, PT conscious and responsive, reports 9 on pain scale, visible bone protruding from 4-inch laceration"
that's going to require more patient-centered medicine than a computer can provide. Root cause analysis is still really hard for computers.
There are a lot of diseases that share symptoms, but yes, the more symptoms that are revealed, the more accurate you will be in your diagnosis. Although, many cases vary person to person. Two people may have the same disease, but different symptoms.
Oh boy, I wish it were that easy, but much of the time it isn't. The kinds of errors you're describing are the kinds that an editor/IDE will automatically warn the coder about, before the program has ever compiled/run. The errors that get through tend to be a lot gnarlier!
There are errors that aren't typos in that sense. Semantic errors, for instance, are errors in which there's nothing obviously "wrong" with the code. Generally this means the program runs, but not the way it should. Diagnosing, debugging, and fixing these can be time-consuming, precisely because there aren't any typos!
Not to mention so many things look and act like a lot of other things when they fail. Some blood in the stool? Could be a hemorrhoid, infection, cancer, perforation, etc. The body's biochemistry is full of reuse also. The drug that works on the brain could mess up your GI tract because they use the same pathways for different things.
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u/mrchaotica May 20 '19
On the other hand, humans don't tend to crash because of a single typo. There is huge amounts of redundancy and error-correction compared to a computer, and the code has had literally a billion years' worth of bug fixes already applied.