The article largely deals with unfortunate side effects of a combination of feedback loops, implicit bias, economics, and lack of technical understanding in the broader community -- quite the opposite of any "conscious decision".
Second, AI is used to disproportionately benefit the privileged while worsening inequality.
The article talks a lot about the challenges of care delivery and how there appears to be systemic breakdowns in how patients are listened to and how demographics seems to lead to worse outcomes. These are all serious issues. It further states essentially that AI, at least learning based AI, learns what it is trained with and most training data indirectly encodes the various social biases that influence the data collection or what is collected in the data. The is true too.
However neither of these have to do with AI curing cancer. They seem more statements that AI won’t solve all social ills, which is absolutely true. But these don’t speak to given a positive cancer diagnosis can AI provide a route to curing an individuals cancer. I suspect the answer is “maybe,” but none of the social and political points made are why. It’s because cancer is very complex and we need a vector that AI can generate some solution in to treat any specific cancer. Since there are many many types of cancer and many many variants of those types, as well as per individual cancer genetic variability, it seems unlikely “AI will cure cancer,” but I think it’s very likely AI will make cancer treatment much more personalized, discover many new therapeutic agents, and accelerate human driven research. It is already used in generic immunotherapy, mRNA design, and other treatments. As tools and techniques become better, as well as our understanding of how to apply it, AI will help a lot.
- "AI is used to disproportionately benefit the privileged while worsening inequality"
- "the goal is to increase corporate and government revenues by denying poor people resources"
- “It is a pattern throughout history that surveillance is used against those considered ‘less than’, against the poor man, the person of color, the immigrant, the heretic. It is used to try to stop marginalized people from achieving power.”
- The same pattern is found in the role of technology in decision systems.
- "The goal of many automated decision systems is to increase revenues for governments and private companies"
- "here is already a clear pattern in which AI is used to centralize power and harm the marginalized."
Few people on HN can read this kind of critique without short circuiting but it’s a valid critique and I would bet a good sum that if you looked into this author you’d find lots more direct evidence of promulgation of leftist ideology (critical theory)
Good intentions with bad outcomes are still bad outcomes. Ignoring the trends is to ignore those marginalized by them even more.
The problem was that the calculation for housing (not food) welfare benefits changed and the migration to the new software that came with it went poorly.
The recent Google Gemini image fiasco seems like a rather solid example of this being real.
edit: It is clear that, even at the current stage of decent summarization, this is transformative tech that can 10x current workflows today.