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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I paid a great deal less attention in med school than I should have, from the month of anatomy classes I can't remember because I was getting frisky under the bench, to the period where I was severely depressed and barely dragging myself to class.

Damn. I feel like laying pipe during labs would condition oneself to enjoy going to classes, if not being a general cure-all for depression. Pipetting dishes on the bench and piping bitches under them.

Cynicism can be a source of optimism.

As amazing as GPT is, I don't see it replacing doctors or knowledge workers in general anytime soon. Normie humans prefer dealing with other normie humans. GPT would need to be substantially better than a given knowledge worker to replace him or her, just as driverless cars would likely need to be substantially better than a given replacement-level driver for driverless cars to be widely accepted.

Furthermore, my personal suspicion is that a lot of the value-add (or "value-add") meat-bag knowledge workers bring is providing a face (and credentials) to build trust and a someone to potentially blame and/or sue when things go wrong: Human punching bags in waiting, bodies to throw under the bus when needed, soldiers to push onto grenades, corpses to stack in building terrain for shit to roll down-hill. Upon a failed pitch, a frustrated investment banking MD might chide an VP for poor process execution, who in turn blames an Associate for poor pitch-deck quality, who then reams an Analyst for a logo being the wrong shade of blue on slide 3 or a graph being misaligned on slide 33. Harder for an MD to blame an AI that cobbled together the memos and decks, without looking/feeling like a chump.

In the near future, I'd only expect GPT to provide greater scale for knowledge workers, as gamechangers ranging from Excel to TensorFlow have done. If you need DEI-related statements, GPT has got you fam. If you need code in some language in which you're not fluent, GPT will at least give you something that you can start with (sometimes even a robust solution, with well-named variables and everything). However, depending on country, I wouldn't be surprised if GPT gets outlawed in fields like medicine and finance under the guise of HIPAA-adjacent and confidential information concerns, respectively—if it's not already blocked/banned preemptively by a given employer along those lines.

GPT would need to be substantially better than a given knowledge worker to replace him or her,

Or, you know, substantially cheaper while being of comparable or better in terms of outcomes.

I think that medical automation will be scrambled in as fast as feasible in at least India and the UK, for similar reasons.

The NHS is extremely costly, and also an unslayable albatross that no government can outright destroy and expect to win the next election.

As such, there's a massive impetus to cut costs, including avoiding paying for expensive consultants, replacing junior doctors with NPs/PAs that accept higher base pay for little to no career progression, using IMGs to prop up the NHS in working conditions the locals won't accept etc.

Pay erosion has prompted large strikes, still unresolved, in the UK by doctors. In response, the government has already pledged to attempt to automate as much of the NHS as possible, simply as a cost saving measure and as leverage against uppity doctors.

India too grapples with lack of access to healthcare, our public hospitals are heavily overburdened, and once awareness spreads of how effective AI is at the job, I expect rapid adoption.

And I suspect that the local populace will be quite accepting of it, better to have an AI doctor they suspect is worse than a human, versus no doctor at all, or very limited access to them.

The NHS is extremely costly

Compared to what? The UK spends less per capita on healthcare than many developed countries:

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/