AI discourse is mostly really dumb but I do enjoy the insight it gives us into the fantasy lives of its adherents. I guess it’s a bit like QAnon in that way, offering us a chance to see what people want unbounded by reality. - ThreadSky

joolia.bsky.social • 456 days ago

AI discourse is mostly really dumb but I do enjoy the insight it gives us into the fantasy lives of its adherents. I guess it’s a bit like QAnon in that way, offering us a chance to see what people want unbounded by reality.

Reposted from Bad Medical Takes

Comments

jinesh.bsky.social•456 days ago

Even if you buy his premise, what will stop companies from monetizing that benevolent medical AI? Because companies never put profit over people, right?

marktspence.bsky.social•456 days ago

Matty's Platonic medical ideal...

bencollins.bsky.social•456 days ago

Revenge fantasy for personal grievances and petty slights. "AI will replace you" is the gen x blogger's version of "I wanna speak to your manager."

ajm6792.bsky.social•456 days ago

Matty was born in 1981. Please do not ascribe this Millennial to Gen x 😜

marktspence.bsky.social•456 days ago

Yeah--we already have our *own* shitheads, thank you very much! (Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Elon Musk, et al...)

jonesm80.bsky.social•456 days ago

Aside from incorrectly assigning the generation to blame, Matty is a proud Millennial, you're absolutely right.

speterdavis.com•456 days ago

During the writer strike it was rather frightening to see how many people think they would prefer fully AI generated entertainment over the risk of seeing a minority on TV

zoopaul.bsky.social•456 days ago

It reminds me of imbeciles constantly saying, "Learn to code."

eschatonblog.com•456 days ago

hey yggie's a millennial

yastreblyansky.bsky.social•456 days ago

he has a Gen X soul

burghpunk.bsky.social•456 days ago

Generations are kind of squishy and we’re happy to hand him off

srossmktg.com•456 days ago

Something something "useful medical advice..." https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate-forces-elderly-out-of-rehab-nursing-homes-suit-claims/

joolia.bsky.social•456 days ago

But also… there is a world in which doctors are not primarily or even secondarily influenced by profit motives or insurance strictures and it exists almost everywhere else on earth and doesn’t require pretending a computer can attain human judgement.

geocommonsense.bsky.social•456 days ago

My father was a rural doc at a time/place when/where they delivered their own babies, performed their own surgery, and acted as the emergency room 24 hours a day - and made house calls regardless of time or weather.

He bristled greatly at insurance company interference in his care of patients.

jeffreywuhl.bsky.social•455 days ago

Insurance companies are vile middlemen who offer exactly zero benefit to society.

pseudofootball.bsky.social•456 days ago

This is my area of expertise and I can tell you financial motives exist in all countries, they are just different. For example, in Germany doctors have a “budget” per patient diagnosis that directs treatment options

thatandromeda.bsky.social•456 days ago

Is that like....literally per patient or on average? Like can you blow your budget on the person recovering from complex traumatic injuries and make it up on people who just need cheap boring inhalers? Or if you need a ton of surgery & physical therapy after a car crash (say) you're out of luck?

pseudofootball.bsky.social•456 days ago

There is some wiggle room, it’s per patient and it requires differential diagnosis if you want to justify treatment beyond what has been accepted as routine approach. E.g., kidney stone diagnosis, x amount expected cost/budget

pseudofootball.bsky.social•456 days ago

For the kidney stone example I was working with a company that was developing a treatment to prevent kidney stones and hit a brick wall in Germany because it’s cheaper to treat than prevent

natkinson.bsky.social•456 days ago

And also, “healthcare algorithms, famously indifferent to the bottom line of the healthcare industry “

bencollins.bsky.social•456 days ago

They are unable to see a world unperturbed by profit motive because they really like a world where everything is profit motivated, except when it effects them negatively.

bluememe.bsky.social•456 days ago

Which gets to the fundamental flaw in the utopian AI doctor dream: any such technology will be created and offered by companies motivated by…profit.

Hard to innovate your way out of capitalism.

modreplica.bsky.social•456 days ago

"Welcome to your free-tier AI Doctor service. Pleas set up your mandatory payment method to proceed. You cannot be prescribed without it!

'*ping* Bloating? Tummy ache? Ask if Ebola-Nix is right for you!

*ping* Fill out your health maintenance quiz for for the day to maintain your insurance!"

joolia.bsky.social•456 days ago

honestly though it’s interesting to have your experience of the healthcare industry be “doctors are trying to sell me things I don’t want” instead of “doctors are telling me I need things I can’t have because my insurance says so”

grudgie.bsky.social•456 days ago

Yep! and the most common organizational frustration with providers across the industry is that they refuse to give a shit about system economics.

wrobind.bsky.social•456 days ago

Doctors aren’t good at selling, they have the nuanced technique of a voice-response robot.
Which works quite well for the message, “Buy from me, if you want to live.”

thielman.bsky.social•456 days ago

“AI merchants, now those are honest folks unencumbered by negative Bayesian priors”

joqatana.bsky.social•456 days ago

Medicaid happily paid for the box of opioids handed to me by a gastroenterologist without asking any questions. At all.
I tossed them.
Was he supposed to have been giving addictive drugs to homeless people, no questions asked?

eschatonblog.com•456 days ago

And believing this is the modal experience

joolia.bsky.social•456 days ago

pulls into a booth in a diner in Scranton, flicks open a notepad

local sex offender & RNC delegate: “my doctor keeps offering me thoughtful interventions to my complex physical and mental health problems and I’m like, ‘back off doc we don’t want your east coast blood pressure medication over here”

below-left.bsky.social•456 days ago

It can be both, insurance likes paying for some things that doctors are also incentivized to provide even if they're not optimally useful, while there are other things insurance hates paying for despite their usefulness.

sylvainsylvain.bsky.social•456 days ago

I assume yr talking about preventative stuff, like cancer screenings and stop-smoking programs?

Interestingly, that stuff is seen as a loser by insurance companies now; they pay for it now, but you may very well be w another insurance company when you would see the benefits. Capitalism kills all.

mdaware.org•456 days ago

I think AI is almost certain to make medicine more profit-focused, not less, at least in the short/medium term and without some sort of major change in US medical structure and politics

ellenb.bsky.social•456 days ago

And let’s also remember that the odds of AIs developed by for-profit corporations not eventually being trained to sell you stuff is… zero. AI tools might start out with little ads on the side and over time the metrics will incentivize further and further indistinguishable integration with AI output.

hortz.bsky.social•456 days ago

Truth 😊

grahamshevlin.bsky.social•456 days ago

I thought it was the 2023 version of "learn to code".

jaredadams.bsky.social•456 days ago

Thus were the kAIrens born.

peoriabummer.bsky.social•456 days ago

An AI would never be trained to maximize profits to the detriment of patients. These ding dongs never think their hypotheticals through even one more step.

nottodayknees.bsky.social•456 days ago

The idea that tech overlords won’t ram as many ads into your curated algorithmic experiences so absurd that I can’t believe a paid contrarian centrist would write. Wait.

webrant.bsky.social•456 days ago

The enablers that serve concentrated capital have a well-paid job to always promote their latest exploitation.

cityofbob.bsky.social•456 days ago

Looking forward to the Medicaid algorithm.

ironcurtainyc.bsky.social•456 days ago

Not to mention that I know doctors in my family and none of them are trying to "sell bad medical services" whatever that means (as if AI would be better at that anyway 🙄).

feldspar.bsky.social•456 days ago

one thing l know about AI is it's definitely not a cash grab based on poorly understood tech!

jimlsilver.bsky.social•456 days ago

Or, you could forgo both by doing your on research on the internet and diagnosing yourself.
Would probably work as well as Dr. AI.

chuckysumner.bsky.social•456 days ago

It's crazy he can think this way, but not identify how the profit motive in healthcare is the problem and not doctors. Doctors can only operate within the confines of our broken medical paradigm. Also, does he honestly believe pharma and insurance won't influence AI imputs. Total 🤡🤡🤡

tcarmody.bsky.social•456 days ago

This smashes together two fanfic genres: “AI without capitalism” and “AI somehow makes capitalism perfect”

pedinska.bsky.social•456 days ago

That's not only an AI wet dream it's also a nasty mischaracterization of most physicians I know. And I know a lot. Given how AI's been working I say we move Mattie to the head of the AI doc line and let him report back on that. 🙄

bakeshakenbake.bsky.social•456 days ago

They ascribe tons of power and potential to something which, so far, either pads out search engine results like a 6th-grader writing their first 500 word essay or churns out composite photos of sexy anime women

kakotechnia.bsky.social•456 days ago

These pronouncements should always asterisk “you” to mean “not me though”

rachelgraves.bsky.social•456 days ago

Why would AI be any less motivated to sell you something? Does he think AI is really just magic with no human input at all?

scottaolson.bsky.social•456 days ago

Matt Y is an inch away from talking Med-Beds and NESARA

drmayab.bsky.social•456 days ago

Unbounded by reality, I really just want a holodeck to play on.

marco.jard.im•456 days ago

I imagine getting diagnosed by an AI would be as useful as those "see your compatibility with your loved one" quizzes but potentially a lot more dangerous.

thatandromeda.bsky.social•456 days ago

this crashed up against all that time I've spent as a mom at Boston Children's on the sidelines of the best medical care in the world and absolutely broke my brain

I'm sorry he's never met good doctors, I guess??

triplingual.bsky.social•456 days ago

Also he’s never met the corporations that will own these medical doctors? They aren’t going to look for every opportunity to “upsell” you?

joolia.bsky.social•456 days ago

A lot of the mainstream AI fantasies focus on making certain professions obsolete, especially doctors, therapists, teachers and artists. It’s stupid but also interesting to think about why this is an object of desire.

400trix.bsky.social•456 days ago

Interesting how it’s never executives that they want to make obsolete.

rogerjva.bsky.social•456 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/rogerjva.bsky.social/post/3keu7spx5ts27

drmikewiser.bsky.social•456 days ago

I don't have data to back this up, but I suspect a lot of people hate being told what to do, and doctors, therapists, and teachers are some of the not-their-parent roles who often end up telling people what to do.

yoboseiyo.bsky.social•456 days ago

yep. it's petulant "you aren't the boss of me!" bullshit.

reverendjesus.com•456 days ago

Which is funny, because those are exactly the kind of people most likely to 100% flip their shit when a computer tells them what to do.

drmikewiser.bsky.social•456 days ago

I feel like the whole point of having experts is so that we don't all have to try to know everything. But experts are only valuable if you will actually listen to them in their area of expertise. Obviously, not infallible - I've had doctors tell me factually untrue things - but default is listen.

drmikewiser.bsky.social•456 days ago

But, like, I don't know how to build a second story deck. I could probably learn. OR, I could ... pay a construction company to do a better job than I would, and listen to them when they tell me what is / is not possible in these conditions with this budget. That seems better.

penders.bsky.social•456 days ago

My first hunch: in an ideal world, all of them instill resilience and resistance to power. Their AI counterparts would not. Controlling the (former) voices of dissent solidifies power.

legalminimum.bsky.social•455 days ago

Having spent much of my career among such types, I would submit that it’s because they radically don’t understand what these professions do. Examples: “doctors provide diagnoses”, “teachers provide lessons”, “artists provide pictures”. As in: they mistake the output for the work.

legalminimum.bsky.social•455 days ago

And so they’re focused on creating a thing that can deliver “identical” or even “better” outputs.

alun.pw•455 days ago

These AI doctors will also deliver better sales pitches for medical services, and won't deliver the diagnosis until you accept.

ckjohnsonbk.bsky.social•456 days ago

I used to write little blurbs on the animals in the preschool where I worked. I tried to include information a young child would like, such as “this snake is 3 years old!” My boss gleefully told me he replaced my blurbs with ChatGPT-generated text “that I think is just as good as yours.” OK.

ktwiegman.bsky.social•456 days ago

What a tiny, tiny person.

pedinska.bsky.social•456 days ago

Vindictive.

pedro45fan.bsky.social•456 days ago

I would have been sorely tempted to write AI generated insults on post-its and then leave them all around this person's office.

luxalptraum.com•456 days ago

I’ve long been fascinated by people who argue that it’s going to make sex work (or, even more broadly, women) obsolete, which seems driven both by misogyny and a lack of understanding as to what makes sexual encounters exciting

zoopaul.bsky.social•456 days ago

However, it will make porn-on-demand a real thing.

luxalptraum.com•456 days ago

As a porn industry expert I am skeptical

zoopaul.bsky.social•456 days ago

I'm not saying it'll be good porn (whatever that is), just that people will type in a request and get exactly what they want.

arpdidthat.bsky.social•456 days ago

I wouldn't even trust AI with a virtual hand job, it can't even get the number of fingers right half the time

joolia.bsky.social•456 days ago

The paper clip stuff is, again, mostly stupid, but I think it speaks to the latent violence behind a lot of these anticipatory movements. There is a yearning for violence and destruction that I think is probably best not ignored.

diogeneslamp.bsky.social•456 days ago

What is "the paper clip stuff"?

joolia.bsky.social•456 days ago

shorthand for people who think that we should ignore all the problems with AI as it exists now in order to focus on the imaginary existential threat of AI In the future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips

diogeneslamp.bsky.social•456 days ago

Oh, it's like the Greenfly infestation in the novel "Galactic North." AIs that want to turn the whole galaxy to vegetation.

thatandromeda.bsky.social•456 days ago

I also think there's a dose of...this particular class of AI doomers cannot conceive of a world where the AI risk TO THEM is (eg) housing discrimination or ghost work, so they (ignoring the real & present) ascribe to it the only risk they see as able to hurt THEM, to wit, violent apocalypse

joolia.bsky.social•456 days ago

(The people who spend their time asking AI for scenarios in which it’s ok to use racial slurs have the most barren imaginations possible and it’s sad but also watch out for tumbleweeds.)

cat-appreciator.bsky.social•456 days ago

A lot of the AI cultist stuff is basically Christian eschatology with a different coat of paint. There’s a reason the technological singularity gets called “the rapture of the nerds”. In some ways they’re identical to Evangelical apocalypse cultists.

jaytingle.bsky.social•456 days ago

Matt needs AI desperately, to wall off the unpleasant, disagreeable reality of existence that taps at his window.

doomnuken.bsky.social•456 days ago

It saddens me how much AI is being funded mostly for profit seeking instead for the good of everyone. They might coat it as a good thing but in the end greed will be the main incentive and will be also be their demise cause sustainability is only when the ones on the bottom decide to do it.

nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social•456 days ago

It shows a touching faith in the people who own and operate this hypothetical software doctor. *They* will be untouched by the profit motive.

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