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Comment by madenine | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see an article talking about how we're going to destroy the economy by turning fast food workers into kiosks and replacing teamsters with self-driving trucks... I just think how much easier it is to replace the average white-collar worker.

Accountants, corporate lawyers, clerks, receptionists, schedulers... so many jobs that will either be eliminated or made so that 1 person can do the work of 20, leading to outsourcing and consolidation.

'First they came for the accountants, but I did not speak out because they were paying me really well to design weak AI to replace the accountants...'

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I've lost the link, but I read a thread recently with doctors laughing at the idea they could ever be replaced with anything related to AI.

The 1 in 20 left - is so clearly going to happen to that profession - I suspect they'll be hit harder than truck drivers.

Once you get every symptom, every generic fingerprint, every prescription and every outcome for a decade in to a TensorFlow model - it's going to smash current results.

It won't be guessing at 100mg or 200mg, it will be prescribing 127mg/day for first week, and 122mg/day for the second - a year later it will bring that advice down to 126.

This is an utter fantasy. Small scale limited scope tools being rolled out to augment diagnosis -- Yes. AI doctors -- No :( Also the data is probably mostly shit -- physicians are fallible and like all people potentially incompetent or negligent -- these trends would be reflected in whatever historical data is used, that inefficiency would simply be made much faster with automation -- which is why they will try it first in India before it is ever approved on Western soil.

On the other hand a RL system that pokes and prods a living persons brain with electrified needles and uses a conv net to watch for feedback from the resulting facial expressions is completely possible -- with enough training experience anybody could convince me of anything using it. One 30 second session to ensure a lifetime of compliance and happiness -- the promotional material can have a guy drinking a glass Kool-Aid with a look of tranquil bliss on his face.

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