The first email I ever wrote was to Scott Adams. He actually replied!
I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist.
I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick message about how and why he should convert. He replied to me (unconvinced) and I replied back, at which point he realized I was a child and the conversation ended.
When I heard he was dying of cancer I wrote him another email, again offering my own unsolicited thoughts, this time on cancer and experimental treatments. He did not reply, but I thought there was a kind of symmetry to it -- I wrote him towards the start of my life and again towards the end of his.
Interesting guy, I've enjoyed several of his books and the comics for many years. He had a big impact. Tough way to die.
They will brag about each unit sold to investors to demonstrate product/market fit, and then raise probably 10-100x the sales price per unit from investors.
The only part of this article I believe is the legal and bureaucratic burdens part.
"Human radiologists spend a minority of their time on diagnostics and the majority on other activities, like talking to patients and fellow clinicians"
I've had the misfortune of dealing with a radiologist or two this year. They spent 10-20 minutes talking about the imaging and the results with me. What they said was very superficial and they didn't have answers to several of the questions I asked.
I went over the images and pathology reports with ChatGPT and it was much better informed, did have answers for my questions, and had additional questions I should have been asking. I've used ChatGPT's information on the rare occasions when doctors deign to speak with me and it's always been right. Me, repeating conclusions and observations ChatGPT made, to my doctors, has twice changed the course of my treatment this year, and the doctors have never said anything I've learned from ChatGPT is wrong. By contrast, my doctors are often wrong, forgetful, or mistaken. I trust ChatGPT way more than them.
Good image recognition models probably are much better than human radiologists already and certainly could be vastly better. One obstacle this post mentions - AI models "struggle to replicate this performance in hospital conditions", is purely a choice. If HMOs trained models on real data then this would no longer be the case, if it is now, which I doubt.
I think it's pretty clearly doctors, and their various bureaucratic and legal allies, defending their legal monopoly so they can provide worse and slower healthcare at higher prices, so they continue to make money, at the small cost of the sick getting worse and dying.
First, just from a "danger" standpoint - more people in the EU die from heat than from guns in the US. And roughly 8 times more people die from cold than heat in Europe. So, I would say, that we live in an environment where our neighbors are armed the same way you live in an environment where you're often dangerously hot or cold - i.e. we get used to it.
Second, you can walk or drive on a street. Every passerby in a car could kill you if they wanted to by colliding with you. It rarely happens. Stand next to a tall ledge or overpass with crowds walking by and watch the teeming masses - you're unlikely to see any of the thousands of people walking by leap off to their end. Similarly, in life, even though basically anyone could kill you, it's very rare to encounter someone who is in the process of ending their own life, and killing you would basically end, or severely degrade, their own life. Almost nobody wants to do it.
Charlie Kirk is/was kind of an extreme example. He said many things that severely angered hostile people. He went into big crowds and said provocative things many times before being shot. I think in most situations you have to push pretty hard to get to the point where people are angry enough to shoot at you. If you can avoid dangerous neighborhoods and dangerous professions (drugs and gangs) and dangerous people (especially boyfriends/husbands) then you are pretty unlikely to be shot and you benefit from being able to carry guns or keep guns in your home to protect yourself and your family.
For one example, consider the "Grooming gangs" in the UK, where thousands of men raped thousands of girls for decades with the tacit knowledge/permission of authorities - and despite the pleas of the girls and parents for help. Such a thing could be handled quite differently in a society that was well armed. If the police wouldn't help you, you might settle the matter yourself.
This looks pretty trivial. Obviously modern gains in life expectancy were from removing things that killed us in early age. This says nothing about future gains in life expectancy which may come from biological/medical interventions that reduce senescence.
I have a 3 year old who uses AI by talking to ChatGPT's advanced voice mode. He enjoys talking to it and we also use image generation to generate images he's interested in.
He also likes to translate words into different languages - he uses Alexa for this, constantly translating stuff into all the languages he knows about, and he learns that other languages exist when Alexa misunderstands him and translates into a new language - e.g. yesterday he was asking Alexa to translate "eat spinach" and it misunderstood him as asking for "Eat" in "Finnish", and now he knows there's a new language he can translate to.
One thing that comes up a lot in our household is which things in the house are intelligent and which are not. For example, I once heard my son asking the fan to turn itself on, which seems pretty reasonable since some things in our house do respond to voice commands, and sorting out which do and which do not is not intuitive. There's a similar issue in the car sometimes. When our car's audio system is connected to a phone, my son can control what music is playing by saying "Okay Google, play labubu", but when we are listening to the radio, it doesn't work, and sometimes he will try to either command or ask us to control the radio (e.g. "restart this song"). Difficult concepts to explain to a child that we do control what plays on the phone but not on the radio and why.
Another AI activity we've done is vibe coding. My son is a big fan of numbers and countdowns, and asking Claude to generate a webpage with colorful numbers counting up and down and buttons to click to change the numbers and animations and so on works really well.
I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist.
I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick message about how and why he should convert. He replied to me (unconvinced) and I replied back, at which point he realized I was a child and the conversation ended.
When I heard he was dying of cancer I wrote him another email, again offering my own unsolicited thoughts, this time on cancer and experimental treatments. He did not reply, but I thought there was a kind of symmetry to it -- I wrote him towards the start of my life and again towards the end of his.
Interesting guy, I've enjoyed several of his books and the comics for many years. He had a big impact. Tough way to die.
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