Comment by pc_edwin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pc_edwin | Hacker News Reader

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"londons_explore" - Ahh the classic British cynicism (Don't ban-ish me señor Dang, I'm British so I can say this).

> Similar possibilities existed in medicine for 50 years

It would've been like building the tower of babel with a bunch of raspbery pi zeros. While theoretically possible, practically impossible and not (just) because of laws, but rather because of structural limitations (vector dbs of the internet solves that)

> Patents and byzantine regulations will stunt its potential

Thats the magic of this technology, its like AWS for highly levered niche intelligence. This arms an entire generation of rebels (entrepreneurs & scientists) to wage a war against big pharma and the FDA.

As an aside, this is why I'm convinced AI & automation will unleash more jobs and productivity like nothing we've seen before. We are at the precipice of a Cambrian explosion! Also why the luddites needs to be shunned.

statistical approaches could have been done 50 years ago.

Imagine for example that 'disease books' are published each month with tables of disease probabilities per city, per industry, per workplace, etc. It would also have aggregated stats grouped by by age, gender, religion, wealth, etc.

Your GP would grab the page for the right city, industry, workplace, age, gender etc. That would then be combined with the pages for each of the symptoms you have presented with, and maybe further pages for things from your medical history, and test results.

All the pages would then be added up (perhaps with the use of overlayed cellophane sheets with transparency), and the most likely diseases and treatments read off.

When any disease is then diagnosed and treatment commenced (and found effective or ineffective), your GP would fill in a form to send to a central book-printer to allow next months book edition to be updated with what has just been learned from your case.

> I'm British so I can say this

can you, though? it's not scalably confirmable. what you can say in a British accent to another human person in the physical world is not necessarily what you can say in unaccented text on the internet.

Hahaha nice one.

Funnily enough, it is scalably confirmable. You can feed all my HN comments before chatGPT into well.. chatGPT and ask it whether I'm british based on the writing.

I bet we are just a version or two away from being able fine tune it down to region based on writing. There are so many little things based on whether your from Scotland, Wales or London. Especially London!

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