Come to think of it, 90% is pretty low for a course of totally unnecessary chemotherapy that cold've been avoided by a human doctor noticing, as humans often do, how dumb the provided explanation was. So maybe even as a patient this isn't an obvious choice.
More generally, I'm super amused by the idea that the Master Algorithm will fall out of the brilliance at few big tech companies, but only if they could have access to my purchase history or porn viewing habits from the past decade.
That being said, at some point in the future, when these types of problems with NN can all be ironed out, I think going with the NN will be the obvious choice. The massive numerical complexity of cancer and the human body is too large for any human to understand and treat optimally.
NN + doctor for now; just NN in the (relatively near) future.
Remember that AlphaGo game where the commentator thought it must have made a mistake because it did a move that was obviously wrong but then it surprised everyone by winning because of that?
"Domingos: The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is putting too much value on the factor of explainability -- meaning why an algorithm decides this way rather than that way. Let's take the example of cancer research, where machine learning already plays an important role. Would I rather be diagnosed by a system that is 90 percent accurate but doesn't explain anything, or a system that is 80 percent accurate and explains things? I'd rather go for the 90 percent accurate system."
"Domingos: There is this notion predating the GDPR that data can only be used for the purpose it was collected for. This sounds plausible, but if we had been using that principle all along we would not have penicillin. We would have no X-ray. We wouldn't have all of the scientific discoveries that came unexpectedly. Serendipity, discovering new things in old data, is a huge driver in progress."
Hear, hear.