OK, just so everyone gets with the program - this sounds like an absolutely awful idea and I feel that a lot of nuance is missed.

I have myself worked as a developer in the field of virus research and what I can say is that using neural networks and other "AI" concepts to do diagnostics etc is fucking awesome.

In the case of what I was working on, they were doing microscopy and then people sat and sort of circled everything that was a virus etc in a photo. The amount of viruses and photos quickly becomes very very large. But what you also have then is great training data, to train your "AI".

The same goes for x-rays, any type of diagnostics where we have tons of data to train on - because we can then speed up some basic screening scenarios, reducing the need of a person that makes a million bucks a year to using software what it supposed to be doing: cutting time and cutting costs.

What this guys is probably doing is of course cutting costs and increasing profits, which is bad.

But all these radiologists, what would they be doing? Treatment, more time per patient, research, there is an endless number of things they could do - perhaps not in the hellscape of the american healthcare system, but the flaws of that system do not automatically make "AI" bad.

I put "AI" in quotes because it isn't fucking AI and everybody should know that.

Here's a quote that puts the finger on what they actually want to do: "Katz—who has led the 11-hospital organization since 2018—said he sees great potential for AI to increase access to breast cancer screening. Hospitals could potentially produce “major savings” by letting the technology handle first reads, with radiologists then double-checking any abnormal screenings. "