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Comment by justonepost | Hacker News Reader

These are fair comments, however I think it's reasonable to say that we need more automation in the home and personal care. Health Care, IMHO, should be solved by AI and Big Data.

I'm a free market person and I believe if the government tried to legislate this, it would screw it up. Rather it should try to open the way for the private industry to create AI based health care solutions.

I'd also like to see character based communities with minimal basic income. Ie, your economic output is not relevant, but rather your character. How kind you are to others, how passionate you are about your talents, how independent you are about looking after yourself. I think this is the real solution to poverty in a world of increased automation.

I know some people want UBI without strings attached, but my feeling is that without some kind of purpose (even a non economic one) mental health issues will increase.

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I have a little exposure to this space (healthcare), and I'm nowhere as optimistic as you that AI or big data will cure what ails us, especially on the small scale (each patient).

Datamining is likely to help detect and clarify negative patterns in large groups (like when stents don't actually reduce angina). But doing the same to find positive patterns to shape policy seems to be much harder due to the wild variation inherent in individual patient response to each therapy.

Existing therapy is refined via specific experiments which are not amenable to aggregation into large groups that can be 'mined' using AI or DM, thereby adding further value. It's not clear to me what AI can add to existing stat/prob methods here.

Inversely, when trying to characterize patients using their raw data, I've found individual patient data to be so horribly noisy and so often mislabeled as to be useless for more than trivial purposes of individual trend summary. This becomes especially woeful when aggregating digital health records, and is likely to remain so for decades to come (given their current glacial rate of improvement).

When it comes to the prospect of mining medical data to improve treatment, I can only say, "GIGO".

>if the government tried to legislate this, it would screw it up

Agreed.

>Rather, [the government] should try to open the way for the private industry ...

Disagree, at least in part.

One source of personal frustration is the perception that rich techies who made their fortunes by writing programs without explicit government approval/legislation seem to spend a lot of time begging for government solutions (like UBI) or approvals for these problems without first attempting to use their money, brains, and tech with a little creativity to generate extra-governmental solutions.

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