Hinton has been crucified many times in radiology circles for his statements. It honestly feels like we've beaten a dead horse on this. Clearly he was wrong and did not understand the complexity of the field. Although he was wrong, his statements today (through the advent of LLMs) are less insane than they were even 7 months ago and directionally he saw the progress of the technology. His magnitude/timeline was off and time will tell if he is one day proven right.
It's worth remembering exactly what Geoff Hinton said, and how he said it:
“I think that if you work as a radiologist you are like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon,” Hinton told me. “You’re already over the edge of the cliff, but you haven’t yet looked down. There’s no ground underneath.” Deep-learning systems for breast and heart imaging have already been developed commercially. “It’s just completely obvious that in five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists,” he went on. “It might be ten years. I said this at a hospital. It did not go down too well.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md
So Hinton didn't "decry the decline of radiology". His comment brims with exuberant sarcasm about how his chosen approach to AI is about to not only leave radiologists without a job, but also leave them looking like the short-sighted fools he thought they surely were.
Hinton was cock-sure and arrogant, like an undergraduate student who just trained his first neural net. That is quite unbecoming of the man whom the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications have been calling "the godfather of AI", and a Turing award winner, to boot.
That is something he should be called out on, and not allowed to forget. Nor he, nor anyone else who thinks that leaving highly-trained workers without a job is a laughing matter. Nobody should be allowed to make fun of the harmful consequences of the technology they create.