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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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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.