A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.
Same applies for a teacher too, in various other aspects. Reducing important professions into statistical models is exactly the kind of crappification that the author's talking about. The logical conclusion of perfect sensors and tensors is not here, and the lacking substitutes along the way will be profit-driven, not solution-driven.
There is a lot of value from just having help diagnose/triage people with illness. Certainly not a replacement but definitely a complement to get access to healthcare to more.
Sure they can, but many don't either because of lack of time, or quite frankly, because many doctors are bad at their job. And even in the best case scenario we will never be able to provide doctors to 100% of the population. For many people the choice won't be AI or a (free) caring, passionate doctor who has time to understand you and answer your questions, it's AI or nothing.
Same with teaching. A lot of people simply don't have access to teachers, and if even the ones that do, might not have teachers that have the time and knowledge to actually teach what they want to learn.
Fix the low pay and terrible conditions and yeah, you'll easily produce enough doctors and teachers, but late-stage capitalism isn't going to do that...
If the UK where to offer doctors the best pay and working conditions in the world, it could fix the UK doctor shortage, but only by 'stealing' doctors from other countries and making their situation even worse. To the best of my knowledge there aren't many empty slots at UK medical schools due to no one wanting to be doctors.
It's 'easy' for any one richer country to fix their problems simply by outspending and buying up resources from a 'poorer' country (in fact some people claim the UK's problems are due to other countries buying up all the UK doctors and nurses), but that doesn't solve the global problem
Also underfunded and treated shabbily (like all the educational establishments in the UK.) I should have been clearer, I suppose, and said that just improving conditions for the existing doctors and teachers is a stopgap, what's actually needed is a burning out of the hideous policies of the last 12 years and a solid return to a more socialist approach to government.
They can easily produce enough doctors, they just don't. A couple of reasons for this: schools inflate the amount of education required so they they can make more money and doctors go along with it (and a crazy amount of licensing requirements) to prop wages up by keeping the supply of doctors artificially low.
You could be an ICU nurse with 20+ years of experiences. Want to make a jumpt to becoming a doctor? You have to start ALL the way from the beginning of med school as if you an 23 year-old humanities major who decided to go to med school. Your 2 decades of hands-on medical experience counts for exactly nothing in the eyes of medical schools and certification boards. Does anyone really believe this is a good way to run things?
Quite possibly both; governments only switched to universal education instead of having 12 year olds in factories because it was good for the economy, even if some of the lessons are supposed to be good for the (for lack of a better term) "soul".
AIs have more patience than human teachers.
It's very easy for me to see how an "LLM teacher" developed and trained specifically for that purpose could be of HUGE value over that status quo. That doesn't mean that the child's human teacher goes away, only that they now have access to a new amazing tool at home as well.
For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?
The lower of those two is roughly what someone at the UN abject poverty threshold will spend in 48 minutes 30 seconds on "not literally starving to death".
(Assuming you mean literally an order of magnitude: 0.64¢ is, judging by Amazon.com, less than the bulk price of a single sheet of unused printer paper, or two thirds of a paperclip).
[0] 3 or anything equivalent to it, given 4 obviously wasn't
I don't get that. In the poorest people get by on the equivalent of about $1 per day and not many starve. In fact the only part of the planet where the population is booming at the moment is sub Saharan Africa.
Chat GTP and similar will presumably have free tiers.
I'm sorry... I'm supposed to trust my healthcare and child's education to a piece of software whose primary feature is its ability to effectively hallucinate and tell convincing lies?
And assuming AI is at all effective, which implies valuable (which implies lucrative,) you expect services built on it to remain free?
That's not how anything works in the real world.
Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. Compute per dollar is still growing exponentially. Eventually this technology will be widely proliferated and cheap to operate.
I'd like a little more background on that claim.
As far as I've been able to tell from my understanding of LLMs, everything they create is a hallucination. It's just a case of "text that could plausibly come next based on the patterns of language they were trained on". When an LLM gets stuff correct, that doesn't make it not a hallucination, it's just that enough correct stuff was in the training data that a fair amount of hallucinations will turn out to be correct. Meanwhile, the LLM has no concept of "true" or "false" or "reality" or "fiction".
There's no meta-cognition. It's just "what word probably comes next?" How is that just "an engineering problem [that] can be solved"?
We're full of seemingly weird cognitive biases: Roll a roulette wheel in front of people before asking them the percentage of African counties are in the UN, their answers correlate with the number on the wheel.
Most of us judge logical strengths of arguments by how believable the conclusion is; by repetition; by rhyme; and worse, knowledge of cognitive biases doesn't help as we tend to use that knowledge to dismiss conclusions we don't like rather than to test our own.
The people can see a random number that they know is random, and yet be influenced by it when attempting facts.
> LLM output has not discernible pattern to it, you cannot tell at all whether what it's saying is true or not.
LLMs are the pattern. This is a separate axis to "is it true?"
It's almost entirely shit now. Instead of being educated, people are manipulated into bubbles of paranoid delusion and unreality, fed by memes and disinformation. Instead of liberation from corporate ownership, everything is infested with dark patterns, data mining, advertising, DRM and subscriptions. You will own nothing and be happy. Instead of liberation from government, the internet has become a platform for government surveillance, propaganda and psyops. Everyone used to have personal webpages and blogs, now everything is siloed into algorithmically-driven social media silos, gatekeeping content unless it drives addiction, parasociality or clickbait. What little that remains on the internet that's even worth anyone's time is all but impossible to find, and will eventually succumb to the cancer in due time.
LLMs will go the same way, because there is no other way for technology to go. Everything will be corrupted by the capitalist imperative, everything will be debased by the tragedy of the commons, every app, service and cool new thing will claw its way down the lobster bucket of society, across our beaten and scarred backs, to find the bottom common denominator of value and suck the marrow its bones.
But at least I'll be able to run it on a cellphone. Score for progress?
Live performance (orchestra and operas) were for rich only. Beautiful paintings were for the noble and churches. Porcelain was something needed to be imported from another continent. Tropical fruits were so expensive that people rented them.
Now we have the affordable versions of them for everyone in developed countries, and the middle class in developing ones. Yes, often we just got inferior, machine-made or digital copies, but I personally prefer something inferior than nothing.
>but I personally prefer something inferior than nothing.
Say that again when your AI physician prescribes you the wrong medication because it hallucinated your medical history.
You say that like humans don't err, either though malice or madness or mistake.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/766403612/doctor-gets-40-year...
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/18/us/virginia-former-ob-gyn...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/22/lucy-letby-w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...
Yes, and I think it's a pretty good analogy.
> Say that again when your AI physician prescribes you the wrong medication because it hallucinated your medical history.
I personally prefer something inferior than nothing. I just said it again.
When your human doctor prescribes the wrong medication, would you reach the conclusion that the world would be better without human doctors?
The fact is simple. Professional diagnosing is such a scarce resource that people buy over-the-counter drugs all the time. It's not AI vs doctors; it's AI vs no doctor.
Meanwhile, AIs don't possess anything akin to thought, memory, perception or awareness. They simply link text tokens stochastically. When an AI makes a mistake, it's doing exactly what it's designed to do, because AIs have no concept of "reality" or "truth." Tell an AI to prescribe medication, it has no idea what "medication" is, or what a human is. When an AI doesn't make a mistake, it's entirely by coincidence. Yet humans are so hardwired with paredolia and gaslit by years of science fiction that such a simple hat trick leads people to want to trust their entire lives to these things.
>The fact is simple. Professional diagnosing is such a scarce resource that people buy over-the-counter drugs all the time. It's not AI vs doctors; it's AI vs no doctor.
That's not a fact, it's your opinion, and I'm assuming you've got some interest in a startup along these lines or something, because I honestly cannot fathom your rationale otherwise. You're either shockingly naive or else you have a financial stake in putting poor people's lives in the hands of machines that can't even be trusted to count the number of fingers on a human hand.
I have no doubt the future you want is going to happen, and I have no doubt we're all going to regret it. At least I'm old enough that I'll probably be dead before the last real human doctor is put out to pasture.
The big question is will that happen more or less often than it does with human doctor? Human doctors 'hallucinate' stuff all the time, due to lack of sleep, lack of time, lack of education and/or just not caring enough to pay proper attention to what they are doing.
No, they don't. If that happened anywhere near all the time, we would never have given up alchemy and bloodletting, because there would be no reason to trust medicine at all, and yet it works overwhelmingly well most of the time for most people. Meanwhile, AIs hallucinate by design.
You clearly don't have a deep understanding of what doctors and teachers do.
We've seen time and time again that "the people" prefers centralised, paid, convenient management of complexity.
If the majority of "the people" prefers paying a subscription for watching movies or listening to music, I doubt they'll make the effort to learn how to tune and run private LLMs locally, for medical aspects or otherwise. Not when there will be major companies spending billions on marketing more convenient options.
Guillermo Rauch's essay [1] still rings true: it's hard to forego efficiency (though it works just as well for convenience).
Yes, you put in a person + knowledge and get out an educated person. Is it reasonable to expect to put in GPU + text and get somehow a competent actor, however narrowly we define competence (maybe if we define actor narrowly enough)?