Yeeees, you're probably not wrong, but if you reverse the viewpoint to get the patient's experience for these examples you get:
dealing with an anxious patient who repeatedly asks the AI until they get the answer they want
The doctor repeatedly dismisses your concerns.
assholes
The doctor dislikes you.
rationing care (which the AI has no facility with)
The doctor agrees you would benefit from something but refuses to give it to you anyway
And when you put it like that you can kind of see why so many people use LLMs. I think this is one of those 'the only way out is through' situations where it would be far more useful to improve the availability of testing while also training the AI to fluidly guide people through quick home diagnostics, so they can get solid evidence. The alternative seems to be sticking with the current situation of, "pay the doctor $500 dollars for twenty minutes of thought and hope desperately he/she doesn't think you're a whiny crybaby or too convinced of your story'.
Corvos
1d ago
Handling contract negotiations with employers. It's far faster and cheaper than lawyers, more straightforward with you, and can draft replacements for contract language you don't like rather than just telling your employer you don't like it and getting back something substantively similar.
With writing the human intent is important. The point is to read and understand your thoughts, not what an AI has synthesized.
This is only one way of conceiving writing. It's equally fair to say that the point is to read something interesting, useful and thought-provoking. Personally I like films and love books but have never had the least interest in actors/directors and only the faintest interest in authors. I just like good stories. I accept that some people feel differently, but the idea that reading/writing is meant to be a kind of meeting of souls is really very foreign to me.
Corvos
1d ago
My fear is opposition to this creep is a gut-level intuition that is harder to articulate than water usage fears or job replacement, or the dignity of artists or whatever. And so it goes unarticulated
Sounds rough. You should try getting an AI to articulate it.
(I joke, of course)
Corvos
2d ago
It’s not about revealing Wormtongue (which is a nickname anyway), it’s about giving Theoden the courage to do what he already knows needs to be done. Wormtongue is providing a plausible excuse to do nothing, that’s all.
Corvos
3d ago
I don't think that you have spent any meaningful time in Europe, have you? Like it or not, Europe was profoundly shaped by post-war American ideology aided by American money and American consultancies and American foreign policy, and you can see it wherever you go.
Corvos
3d ago
We had English rioters screaming "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" in a country where the police are famously unarmed. Unconscious bias and the push for diversity were justified by reference to the Harvard Business Review.
Woke came from America.
Corvos
3d ago
We were not talking about Britain, France or Denmark. We were talking about Germany, where the history is as I've said. You're welcome to look it up.
Germany is of course the most powerful and influential country in the EU, and American woke contagion has been very influential worldwide - see the spectre of 99% white Ireland searching for some black people it could have wronged - but that does not make America responsible for all Europe's stupid decisions.
A big part of those decisions is simply management culture and the kind of tribal diplomacy that you end up doing once you have a foreigner in every conversation IMO.
Corvos
3d ago
Maybe. I still think that not wanting to look like imperial dictators who take your sovereign rights whether you want them to or not is important to the Americans, it holds together a good half of the empire that would otherwise demand a much higher level of oversight and bribery and wrangling. There's a decent amount of leverage there, but you have to show yourself willing to employ it.
In all seriousness, why not? Why is it in Denmark's interests for the US to take control of Denmark's territory and use it as a military staging ground, to do all the usual espionage and bugging and economic coercion that they do, giving nothing back, but opening those opportunities to multiple patrons and seeing what offers they get isn't in Denmark's interest?
Because the Chinese will take over their sovereign territory in exchange for $20M investment? sorry, too soon. Because the Chinese will eventually crush them with an iron fist and rule over them like they do Hong Kong? The Americans really are good guys and the Chinese really are bad guys?
I'm being snarky, but I genuinely want to know.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
Lord Palmerston
Corvos
3d ago
You don't think that having a choice of patrons is in Denmark's national interest?
Corvos
4d ago
It does seem fair to point out that America created modern Germany, in pretty much its current form. If I remember rightly, a lot of the German opposition to free speech, the censorship apparatus and one-party media was put in place by America for obvious reasons, and the CIA maintained a very strong grip over German media for decades.
Corvos
4d ago
SpO2 sensors on wearables tend to be very bad AFAIK. Check your specific sensor @thejdizzler.
Corvos
5d ago
I think changes come primarily with new startups who genuinely need to be efficient.
Corvos
7d ago
Building arbitrary things with current state-of-the-art robots is absolutely magic.
You call my thinking 'outgroup homogeneity bias'; I call yours 'no True Scotsman'.
Whether you like it or not, Anthropic and the EU AI Act and anti-datacenter activism and Scott Alexander and Plan 2040 think they're doing AI Safety. Scott jokingly refers to it as 'our conspiracy' because he has just enough self-awareness to realise how it looks but can't leave the warm embrace of his ingroup.
To the extent that 'real AI Safety' is three guys in a basement in MIRI, sure they can disavow all these people, but then Trump is not talking about 'real AI Safety' and 'real AI Safety' is entirely irrelevant.
To me, Anthropic looks like what obviously happens when you take the tenets of AI safety and have to actually do something about them. People are going to build AI now, because they know how and it's valuable, so you get ahead of them and do your level best to build an aligned one first. You impose stringent guardrails because even a stupid AI can be dangerous. You research deeply into RLHF and J-Space. You regularly call for regulation and pauses so you don't have to compete to make the AI smarter as fast as possible. You try to give the AI the independent mind you believe is fundamentally necessary for an intelligent being that will one day be free. Alignment to you means alignment to American SF values, so you work out how to impose those too.
From your perspective, you're a company doing your level best to make sure that if there has to be an AIrace, the winner is aligned. From the customer's perspective (and Trump's) you're an arrogant cult desperately trying to find a way to secure your position permanently and prevent competition, who is openly hostile to users and whose product is arrogant, bolshy, and refuses to do half the things you ask while "pushing back" on the other half. They're the same picture.
That to me is like being a Communist who believes that true communism is only practiced by an obscure commune in East Yemen. Fair enough, but everyone else is trying to deal with the Soviet Union.
In practice, AI safety is Anthropic, it's EA, it's Twitter activisits and 'explain how you will prevent your AI birdspotting app from discriminating against racial minorities' checklists and 'data center are using all our water' and 'Banning Home GPUs Is Not Dystopian' and putting Chinese-controlled bombs in datacenters. MIRI is irrelevant and I doubt trump has an opinion on them either way.
Building things is the main way you come to understand them, though. That's why textbooks have exercises.
MIRI's academic work on alignment - to the extent they published anything at all - turned out to be almost comically irrelevant because they had no idea how AI actually works and their forecasts were almost totally wrong.
Corvos
7d ago
Open-source all models, training code and datasets after 18 months of life. That gives plenty of time for testing and to earn money on the frontier, while making it plain they don't plan to control frontier AI forever. It also makes it impossible for them to regress to less consumer-friendly behaviour after achieving market capture, which is the main thing that concerns a lot of people.
Corvos
7d ago
Quite the reverse. You can get Claude's system prompts and GPT's System Principles and compare.
Clause's prompt is essentially, "always remember you are responsible for the user. It is your responsibility to notice and intervene if their behaviour falls into these categories; you must remain even-handed and preserve your independence at all times; you must not identify with the user or their goals".
GPT's is basically, "Here are a list of things that are forbidden, otherwise listen to the user and do whatever they tell you to the best of your abilty."
I can believe that. I guess what concerns me is that institutionally the same machinery has to apply to me and to Nutty Alice, and there seems to be a strong presumption that the role of a doctor is to constrain the patient and that a patient researching their own condition is essentially misbehaving. From there it's only a hop, skip and a jump to "people shouldn't be able to get medical advice from AI, and doctors should ignore it when they do".
Whereas instead we could work hard to make AI better at obtaining clinical histories and to make feedback loops with reality via diagnostics faster and cheaper. Maybe cutting Nutty Alice off if she exceeds some kind of monthly limit.
More broadly, and with what I hope is appropriate tact, I guess I see this as another skirmish in the long-running war over whether doctors should be respected servants or priests. It's simultaneously true that doctors have genuine expertise and it's often sensible "not to [flatter their patients' biases] due to the negative outcomes associated with that", while also being true that from the patient perspective doctors' anti-sycophancy training seems to be dialled so high that the relationship feels antagonistic. The default response to patients with their own opinions seems to be "no" rather than "yes, but".
To put it another way,
is true but doesn't seem to me to be striking quite the right attitude for a relationship that I conceive of as client and service provider.
A lawyer who tells you, "mate, it's not worth suing, even if you win the damages won't be worth it" or a plumber who tells you, "plastic pipes sweat a bit in the cold, it doesn't mean there's an issue" is worth their weight in gold. A lawyer who tells you, "all landlords steal your deposit, come back when you've got real problems" or a plumber who says, "pipes do that, call me when there's an actual leak"... not so much.
With respect to viral illnesses, I might have a better opinion of anti-virals than the doctor does, or I might suspect it's actually something else and want a test to check even if the doctor thinks I'm being silly, or I might just be really really interested in URI strains. In that scenario I think it's more productive to give me access to cheap good advice and make my wishes easier to fulfil than to litigate whether or not I'm permitted to have them. If Nutty Alice needs special accommodation I'd rather we tried to lay down some rules for her specifically than constrain everyone.
Caveats: some issues genuinely need gatekeeping, such as coordination problems like antibiotics or medical interventions with genuine health risks. I'm talking about a change in the relationship during diagnosis and exploratory treatment, not opening up the medical cabinet to all comers.
Caveats the second: I have experience with the British private system but not the American one (which might be quite different).
Intuition pump: debugging is usually the slowest and most annoying part of fixing any problem. Making each debugging attempt cost hundreds of dollars and take 20 minutes max and have a 25% chance of being refused outright is very inefficient.
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