Dear Neil
Thank you for your reply (briefly) to the issue. I will start form the bottom:
Developing countries cannot afford the ChatGPT. “ChatGPT is currently free”. The ChatGPT is not free. The business model that the developers and owners of these companies (Musk, Google, Apple, etc. are among them) are following does not allow it to be free. You taste it and then if you can afford, pay for the full version. See Chris’s response to this.
You said “to anyone with internet access”. Very very very few people have internet access that can be used for AI (ChatGPT access). Only in some capital cities that there is enough bandwidth to do that. If you want me to give example of that, I will do. It has been said that in some countries the whole bandwidth of that country is equivalent to what an individual in the North is having (UK, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc.). The companies and the ITU are “fooling” people by indicating that the number of Internet users is so and so. Yes, they can access the Internet, but cannot do anything on it, apart from accessing the GSM and possibly other services but not the ChatGPT.
Regardless of what Global Health Partnerships says, the countries that don’t have enough doctors cannot afford the ChatGPT, otherwise they can train doctors. Yes, there is a shortage of qualified doctors in developing countries but one of the reasons cited is stealing of doctors by those countries in the North. I can give you real examples if you want.
Medical diagnosis is challenging for AI in one respect. X-Ray images and cancer are examples. The AI is very good in number of crunching not diagnosis and really hope that AI is not used solely to diagnose. In 1995, I visited a centre in Pakistan. In that centre they hide the name of the patient, they collect the X-rays of the patients (for educational purposes at the time) which enables them to know similarities and differences of x-Rays for the new patient. Is that what the AI, in a speedy way, is doing or different?
The book says “'Medical error is one of the leading causes of death in the United States”. First one can tell any story by false statistics. Example: 100% of the people in that company are married to each other. The company has two people: the owner of that company and his secretary. I believe in evidence and statistics but when it comes from the USA one has to take it with a lot of salt grains.
With kind regards
Najeeb Al-Shorbaji, PhD FIAHSI
HIFA profile: Najeeb Al-Shorbaji recently retired from the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked since 1988 in different capacities. He was most recently Director of the Knowledge, Ethics and Research Department at WHO headquarters, Geneva. Previously he was Coordinator for Knowledge Management and Sharing in EMRO (Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office), Egypt. He is a member of a number of national and international professional societies and associations specialised in information management and health informatics. He has authored over 100 research papers and articles presented in various conferences and published in professional journals. He is also a member of the HIFA steering group. Email: shorbajin AT gmail.com https://www.hifa.org/support/members/najeeb