self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
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User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7hr ago
Man (pun not initially intended), I've never felt like "being" a man, nor have I ever felt tempted to become a woman. I wouldn't hit the magic button, I'm content the way I am.
I have a masculine personality and stereotypically male interests. I'm very good at the touchy-feel stuff when I can be arsed (I had a bunch of female friends, even if I had more male friends overall), but I prefer the way men talk to other men. Being a woman also comes with severe inconveniences in the form of periods. And here I was feeling bad for myself after getting migraines once every few months.
When I contemplate changing my body, I envision becoming taller, stronger or more handsome (and escaping from the prison of my flesh)—more masculine—I've never even desired to be twinkish, let alone feminine.
At the end of the day, I don't feel like I have some kind of pointer in my head that affirms my male personality. If I turned into a woman by means either magical or Indistinguishable From It Science, I'd just do the same things I already do. There's no gender dysphoria or euphoria, there just is.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
17hr ago
any human
Does that include people with Down's Syndrome? Outright and obvious diseases aside, I can think of plenty of people who are so unpleasant/pointless to talk to that I'd speak to an AI any day instead. And even within AI, there are models that I'd prefer over the alternatives.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
20hr ago
I've been... lazy in that regard. Far too much money in my account that's not accruing interest. But yes, that's a factor. I also earn an OOM more than I did back India, which definitely helps. If I was less lazy, I'd have put most of my money in the S&P500 by now, but I've already put myself in a much better place than if I'd been complacent about things.
I don't expect that this will necessarily make me rich in relative terms, I'm starting too low, too late. But I want enough of a safety net to survive in comfort for the (potential) period of unemployment when AI eats my profession whole, before we implement solutions such as UBI. Not starving, not dying in a riot, all of that is important to me.
I'm probably in the 99.99th percentile for doctors (or anyone else) when it comes to the use of AI in the workplace. I estimate I could automate 90% of my work (leaving aside the patient facing stuff and things that currently require hands and a voice) if I could.
The main thing holding me back? NHS IT, data protection laws and EMR software that still has Windows XP design language. This means I'm bottlenecked by inputting relevant informant into an AI model (manually trawling the EMR, copying and pasting information, taking screenshots of particularly intransigent apps) and also transferring the output into the digital record.
The AIs are damn good at medicine/psychiatry. Outside my own domain, I have a great deal of (justified) confidence in their capabilities. I've often come to take their side when they disagree with my bosses, though the two are usually in agreement. I've used them to help me figure out case presentations ("what would a particularly cranky senior ask me about this specific case?" and guess what they actually asked?), giving me a quick run-down on journal publications, helping me figure out stats, sanity checking my work, helping decide an optimal dose of a drug etc. There's very little they can't do now.
That's the actual thinky stuff. A lot of my time is eaten up by emails, collating and transcribing notes and information, and current SOTA models can do these in a heartbeat.
To an extent, this is an artifact of resident doctors often being the ward donkey, but I'm confident that senior clinicians have plenty to gain or automate away. The main reason they don't is the fact that they're set in their ways. If you've prescribed every drug under the sun, you don't need to pop open the BNF as often as a relative novice like me would - that means far less exploration of what AI can do for you. Yet they've got an enormous amount of paperwork and regulatory bullshit to handle, and I promise it can be done in a heartbeat.
Hell, in the one hospital where I get to call the shots (my dad's, back in India), I managed to cut down enormous amounts of work for the doctors, senior or junior. Discharges and summaries that would take half a day or more get done in ten minutes, and senior doctors have been blown away by the efficiency and quality gains.
Most doctors are at least aware of ChatGPT, even if the majority use whatever is free and easy. I'm still way ahead of the curve in application, but eventually the human in the loop will be vestigial. It's great fun till they can legally prescribe, at which point, RIP human doctors.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
22hr ago
ChatGPT isn’t so different from, say, Jarvis in Iron Man (or countless other AIs in fiction), and the median 90-100IQ person may even have believed in 2007 that technology like that actually existed “for rich people” or at least didn’t seem much more advanced than what they had.
Eh? I'm very confident that's wrong. Normies might not appreciate the impact of ChatGPT and co to the same degree, but I strongly doubt that they literally believed that there was human-level AI in 2021. AGI was science fiction for damn good reason, it didn't exist, and very, very few people expected we'd see it or even precursors in the 2020s. Jarvis was scifi, and nobody believed that something like Siri was in the same weight-class.
To shift focus back to your main thesis: the normie you describe is accustomed and acclimatized to being average. Bitter experience has proven to them that they're never going to be an "intellectual" and that their cognitive and physical labor is commoditized. It's unlikely that being the smartest person in the room (or in spitting distance) is an experience they're familiar with. Hence they have less to lose from a non-human competitor who dominates them in that department.
On the other hand, their average Mottizen is used to being smart, and working in a role where it's not easy to just grab a random person off the street to replace them. That breeds a certain degree of discomfort at the prospect. I've made my peace, and I'm going to do what I can to escape the (potential) permanent underclass. It would be nice to have a full, accomplished career with original contributions to my professional field or the random topics I care about, but I'll take a post-scarcity utopia if I can get it.
I'll eat my hat if they were anywhere a majority. I'm far more inclined to believe that polling would show something very close to Lizardman's constant.
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