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It's either lawfare or holding out for UBI, and for the first few unfortunates to get the axe, lawfare is likely a better deal.
I'm sure that even banning cloned appearances or voices won't matter, since they can just make Legally Distinct™ versions, and there will be people who are willing to defect and cash out.
If lawyers and doctors were smarter, they'd get right on it too, at least by demanding regulators put massive burdens of evidence to prove that models perform better than humans do. Far easier to pull off today, when the models are still deficient in key areas, versus in 2 to 3 years when it becomes rather obvious they're on par or better. (Obvious, not that they already aren't in most ways that matter)
Is there actually an issue here? Doctors and Lawyers are already 2 of the relatively few fields that are legally regulated. A person with a government license must sign off on all significant practice of either and they are legally responsible if they make any bad decisions, regardless of whether they came from their own brains, a magazine article, or the most recent LLM. So even in the "worst case" what would they do to these fields besides make it easier for the licensees, who would probably get paid well for just reading the output, making sure it isn't insane, and signing off on it? I don't think there'd be much push for change until the general public says something like, hey, why do we have to pay this guy so much just to rubber-stamp this AI output.
Yes, we do have more legal protection than most other professions.
My concern is that will likely still not be enough, at least outside the US (faster at the least). Both the UK and India have such a massive underserviced demand for more healthcare such that if the cost of meeting it with automation was deregulation, then both have already committed to it. The former has midlevels, the later homeopathic and ayurvedic quacks.
And doctors in the US are still expensive, so if hospitals decide to cut down on our numbers while retaining the very senior or the absolute best, then it's little consolation to the 90% of who become unemployable if the remaining 10% are making bank supervising or rubberstamping AI.
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If AI takes off the way you think it will, why would you want a cloned actor when you can have one designed from scratch by the AI to be optimal for your intended audience?
Whatever value that name brands bring? I didn't claim it's optimal. There are plenty of people who watch movies because they hear that their fave actor is in it.
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Don't worry about the doctors and lawyers. If we have experience in anything, it's in raising barriers to entry to protect our privileged status in the economy. There are already laws on the books making unauthorized practice of law or medicine illegal. All you other learned professions are like a century behind the curve here.
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Please dont encourage them. Legislation slowing the adoption of broadly superior AI over conventional doctors is likely to cost thousands of lives
Look, I'll be honest and say that yes, automating away medicine will bring about untold benefits for the world, and that it would be sad indeed if it was delayed or crushed in its infancy.
That's true for almost everything that can be automated, I'm an unabashed transhumanist, and I want humans to be freed from toil or the ever looming spectre of death and decay.
But those high principles are far easier to espouse when you don't have good reason to think that your life, or at the very least, your wellbeing and that of those you love, will be sacrificed in the process.
Walk in my shoes, if not a mile, just a few feet into the future. After devoting a quarter of my life to medicine, including one year where I worked for free helping the poorest of the poor for no pay (a conscious choice), to the point that my mental health deteriorated to almost nil, I found a small reason to hope that I could escape the circumstances of my birth and find a small degree of happiness out in the better parts of the world. And yet, when I've worked harder than I've ever had in my life, to finally get a foot in the door, it's in the process of slamming into my face.
If we were guaranteed UBI
If I knew that I could get citizenship somewhere that could take care of me
If I knew with any degree of certainty things would work out and it would be all right
Then yes, I'd be at the front of the queue, begging to have myself made obsolete, and happy when it happened.
Anyone who finds themselves in my position and still wishes to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the rest of us, I can only applaud their nigh saintly selflessness and will promise to cherish their memory till the light fades from this world.
But I'm no saint, just a deeply scared and broken individual trying to prioritize himself and his loved ones above the world, while still adding more to this world than he takes away from it. I have saved lives, and I doubt my posting on an obscure corner of the internet takes any. If that makes someone hate me and think my stance worthy of condemnation, I certainly share some of their feelings on the matter. I just don't see it outweighing my need to be safe just a little longer.
That twitterism is forever true: You gotta Get the Bag.
Once you have the Bag, you can start worrying about other shit; but you don't owe dick to shit unless you have at least a bit of bag to your name.
It only feels like a problem to me once you have The Bag and keep trying to get more Bag.
It's reverse social contract theory; and it's why I feel more sympathy to shoplifters and gang bangers then financial criminals and patent trolls: If you don't have security and safety, why the fuck should you abide by all the restrictions of society? What have they done for you lately?
This is why a large middle class is necessary for a stable society.
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A radiologist friend of mine was pretty gungho on AI when ChatGPT came out, but he's pretty rapidly soured on it and is motivated to want a lot more regulation of that sort. People have been talking about automating away radiologists for decades at this point, but This Time is Different. Really.
I have little doubt that it is technologically possible to train an AI to make most major radiological diagnosis with average or above-average accuracy. The main obstacle is medical privacy laws restricting the data. HIPAA may be the most destructive statute ever enacted by the United States congress. The fact that it passed the senate 100-0 is perhaps the greatest indictment against democracy that exists.
Buried in this statement is the assumption that only the United States is capable of performing cutting edge medical research.
* which is probably true
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I think that’s a bit much. The intent of the law was to prevent things like your medical records being used against you at work. Like you have a genetic risk for a disease and thus become effectively unemployable because your medical history or genetic data would put you in a high risk pool that would make your boss’s insurance rates go up. And had it been properly written, I don’t think it would be a problem for AI radiology at all.
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I am not claiming that ChatGPT 3.5, which was the SOTA at the time of release and what he almost certainly used, is better than most doctors. I would say it's surprisingly good, about on par with a bright med student in say their third year, which is still plenty useful.
I have on the other hand, become well acquainted with GPT-4, which is where I make that case. Leaving aside my subjective impression, not only did it pass the USMLE, it did so with a 95th percentile score. That's not just a begrudging pass, it's stunning.
Given that the whole point of the USMLE is to comprehensively test the capabilities of a doctor, while also gating entry into residencies, I struggle to see how that isn't overwhelming evidence in its favor. If I sat the USMLE right now, even fresh as I am from an equivalent UK examination with an even lower pass rate, I couldn't do that, and if I could, it would represent at least half a year of constant studying. Since I and tens of thousands of others who aren't 95th percentile are allowed to practise as is..
Further, while GPT-4 has multimodal capabilities, being able to look at image files and understand them, such capabilities are not currently publicly available. I struggle to see how a radiologist would be making proper use of it, let alone when they almost certainly used the older and weaker 3.5, since half their job is looking for weird blobs in an image and translating them to a legible diagnosis or at least a list of findings.
Yes. It is different this time, and we have receipts to show it. Besides, I'm not the same people who were claiming that would be the case as early as two decades ago, if only because I was too busy memorizing multiplication tables.
At least your friend is smart enough to ask for regulation, if only for the wrong reasons. I'd do the same, but only because it's convenient for me, not because I actually think it's worse at the job.
Oh, yes. To be explicit, the souring is out of his fear of its capabilities (rather, what it's clearly tracking toward), not contempt at a lack of them. He's shifted to questions about HIPAA and big tech companies controlling data, importance of bedside manner (hilarious if you knew him), etc.
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