[flagged]
What will our economic future look like?
381–390 of 419 posts
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was also a public health system (Spain), but I guess it might depend on the country. Now that you mentions labs, he spent the last 10 years of his career (maybe more, I don't remember clearly) working at a food analysis lab and there was a lot of waiting for results there, but it is what it is, microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster.
> no LLM in the world can make them go faster You mean the microbes have to double n-times (to get sufficient numbers of microbes) before tests can be run on them. But maybe the LLMs figure out a way to run those tests on microbes that have only doubled 0.1(n-times). You could then think of the LLMs as being a more honest version of Elizabeth Holmes.
If I remember correctly, the procedure was to prepare a food sample, put it in a temperature-controlled environment for 24 hours, and next day see if something grew there or not. If it did, the food was contaminated.
You could try shortening the time to 6 or 12 hours, but then
1) if something grew then the food was contaminated, but if it didn't, how can you be sure it is good or you just didn't wait enough? You would get a lot of false negatives.
2) the lab followed a normal 8 hours a day schedule, so nobody would be there to analize the results. You would not gain anything.
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nurses do actually end up spending more time with patients, it's just that they spend more time with rich patients. The actual, tangible form this is taking right now is concierge medicine, home health aids, private practice, etc. My wife's (very good) ob-gyn had enough of working in institutionalized medicine where she's paid about what a L4 FANG engineer makes and pretty much has to follow the script that the healt…
This has a surprisingly easy solution: get rid of the rich. It's never, in the history of the world, been in anyone's favor, except the oligarchy, to privatize everything.
[dead]
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. The working week reduced hours. Those factories were not producing luxury goods. They produced everyday items for the masses. Things like knives, spoons, tools, textiles, ketchup bottles, shoes, furniture, nails, bicycles, etc. Standard Oil, for example, improved efficiency and reduced the consumer price of kerosene 70%. There's no evidence of outsized profits.
Standard oil is the textbook example of an abusive monopoly and was broken up for that reason. They improved efficiency by cutting exclusive deals with railroads and transport companies due to their size which froze out every other company.
Cutting consumer prices by 70% is not "abusive".
SO's market share never exceeded 90% and it declined during the years of the anti-trust trial.
By cutting launch prices 90%, is SpaceX also an abusive monopoly?
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nurses do actually end up spending more time with patients, it's just that they spend more time with rich patients. The actual, tangible form this is taking right now is concierge medicine, home health aids, private practice, etc. My wife's (very good) ob-gyn had enough of working in institutionalized medicine where she's paid about what a L4 FANG engineer makes and pretty much has to follow the script that the healt…
This has a surprisingly easy solution: get rid of the rich. It's never, in the history of the world, been in anyone's favor, except the oligarchy, to privatize everything.
Making everyone poor never made the world better.
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I flew in piston airliners long ago. They fly low and slow, and barf bags are supplied for a reason (low altitude means lots of turbulence). Today's airliners fly high where the air is smooth, they've gotten very good at avoiding turbulent weather, and there are automated damping systems. The barf bags are still there, but I've never seen anyone use one. The cool thing about piston airliners, though, is the the engin…
I have flown in turboprops, which start just like a jet engine. Yes I bet the startup of a big Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp or Wright Cyclone, belching smoke and fire would have been something to see.
A turboprop is a jet engine :-)
Today's high bypass jet engines also qualify as a turboprop.
The sound of a Merlin V12 coughing into life is just pure joy. My dad had the best job in the world flying P-51s (powered by Merlins). I hired a P-51 to do a flyby at his funeral. I only had to pay for the gas.
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#387> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "grea…
I know this is just an example, but I'm going to say this every time the subject comes up: since human lives are the cost of making the wrong decisions, AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker of any kind in healthcare. If my blood pressure crashes because my nurse is caring for 15 patients at once and didn't notice that the AI decided to pause my norepinephrine, I won't consider "the AI did it" to be any acceptab…
> If my blood pressure crashes because my nurse is caring for 15 patients at once and didn't notice that the AI decided to pause my norepinephrine, I won't consider "the AI did it" to be any acceptable excuse.
While not quite as direct as automatically stopping vasopressors, using proprietary prediction models touted by vendors to be safe has backfired in a major way before:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/27/epic-sepsis-algorithm-an...
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to say that I don't agree with you to an extent, but you should see AI-delivered healthcare numbers to human-delivered and make it a fair comparison. From Google: "Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses. Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, f…
This. It's the exact same argument that was being made (maybe still is) against self driving cars. To be honest, I'm looking forward to more AI in healthcare if it can increase diagnosis success rates and improve treatment outcomes etc.
I think in 20 years we will have ironed this out and will be able to prolong meaningful, high functioning life, using less resources than we do today.
The next decade will be painful. We are in for a lot of surprises along the way
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#389> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "grea…
I know this is just an example, but I'm going to say this every time the subject comes up: since human lives are the cost of making the wrong decisions, AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker of any kind in healthcare. If my blood pressure crashes because my nurse is caring for 15 patients at once and didn't notice that the AI decided to pause my norepinephrine, I won't consider "the AI did it" to be any acceptab…
This is the same faulty standard you constantly hear applied to self-driving cars, where human lives are also often at stake. You don't need the AI to be perfect. You just need it to be substantially better than the average human (which self-driving cars are). Your nurse who's caring for 15 patients at once might not make perfect decisions either. That doesn't categorically disqualify humans from delivering health care
Re: What will our economic future look like?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad is a retired nurse. Most of his work was giving shots, treating wounds, extracting blood, putting IV catheters, etc. In other words, physical tasks. How is an "AI agent" or LLM going to take care of that?
When I watch medical professionals at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through notes, talking to others or waiting for results from some lab down the hall. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks. I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in the hospital tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a publ…
When I watch software developers at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through stackoverflow, zoom chat to others or waiting for results from a github CI run. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks.
I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in technology tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a publicly traded company.