Not true. The company deploying or using the AI (not the frontier AI lab building it) needs to make sure that the AI works. Just like anything else. Not sure why this is complicated.
Not to say that I don't agree with you to an extent, but you should see AI-delivered healthcare numbers to human-delivered and make it a fair comparison.
From Google:
"Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses.
Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, following heart disease and cancer."
It is highly possible that in a few years, AI will be a lot safer in the majority of healthcare situations.
"Taking death statistics from a sample of Medicare patients and extrapolating it to all hospitalized patients is like turning apples into oranges"
"Using studies that identify medical errors that were followed by death to declare that these medical errors necessarily caused these deaths is not fair. What these studies do not take into account is how long these patients would have lived had they received optimal medical care."
The difference is that humans are at least supposed to be accountable for those 250,000 errors. Those humans can naturally care about doing a good job, or they can be motivated to care. They can fear consequences and take pride in avoiding mistakes.
AI can do none of this, and cannot be held accountable for mistakes.
I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes.
> I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes.
You would take those odds? 100x more deaths?
I agree that AI _companies_ should be accountable for the software they produce but I’m not convinced you would go for a 90% chance of survival if you can choose 99.9%.
I guess if you're dead, then it ultimately doesn't matter if someone can be held accountable, although it might matter to your next-of-kin.
But, yea, in general, it would take a huge (1000X or 10,000X) difference in expected outcome for me to trust something that is unaccountable. If the AI company was actually held accountable for its AI's mistakes, I'd definitely change my statement.
AI is a tool just like any other tool. Holding “AI” accountable is like holding JetBrains accountable for the bugs I wrote with their tool than endangered lives of people
There is simply too much money and too many interests vested in the narrative (which many people already believe) that LLMs are thinking, feeling, sapient beings already beyond the threshold of AGI that deserve some status of legal personhood and liability. It is impossible to create the future that these people want to create - one in which AI comprises the new legal class of nobility in an age of technofeudalism - if AI remains just a tool.
how will this manifest itself!? like you envision a future where there will be say a hospital, ran by anthropic which is AI powered fully, no company behind it, just plain Claude running everything from the moment you walk in till you walk out?
I am having a hard time imagining a future where “AI” isn’t just a tool that a given establishment decided to use much like anything else they use
> you envision a future where there will be say a hospital, ran by anthropic which is AI powered fully, no company behind it, just plain Claude running everything from the moment you walk in till you walk out
Everything as much as possible, yes, and the company behind it will be an AI driven autonomous corporation as well. Although I suspect that by then there will be some industry specific AI model being used by hospitals, not just plain Claude.
AI will handle patient data, diagnostics, prescriptions, everything that doesn't absolutely require a human and can't yet be done by a robot.
Somewhere, some human will be making money but they will be far from any legal liability, probably safely ensconced in a bunker on a private island when the gravy train really hits the fan.
>I am having a hard time imagining a future where “AI” isn’t just a tool that a given establishment decided to use much like anything else they use
The people making the decisions, investing the money and writing the laws imagine so much more, though. You assume the future of AI is governed by rational people making rational decisions but it isn't, it's governed by Musk and Thiel and sociopaths and grifters and cultists who want to immanentize the eschaton so they can stand at the right hand of God.
You can bet that every major company CEO on the planet is creaming his jeans at the thought of AI doing every task (except their own) that they currently pay humans to do. Their ideal end state is that the company is themself, thousands of AIs and thousands of robots, zero payroll. Every one of them is dreaming of this.
I do not disagree but I also do not see how, without liability for its action, would a business have customers. Surely there are idiots but if someone put up a sign in front of the hospital like "we are not liable for anything that happens inside these walls" I will venture a guess that business will suffer. This will also open up business opportunities for other businesses to jump in with "we stand by what we do, you'd be crazy to go to _____ for services we are offering."
I might be naive to the core but I think, in the long run, I am not very Doom&Gloom about AI like you are sounding, people have a way of (eventually) making their own decisions and won't put up with this world you are pitching (I hope lol)
I'm not pitching it per se, I'm just claiming that's what I think the endgame for AI is. Corporations (especially in the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance fields) are already masters at avoiding legal liability. What are you [royal] going to do, bleed to death in the streets? Not get your insulin or heart medication? What decisions are you going to make when every company does the same thing? Get your chemo from a shaman? People already put up with massive cruelty and corruption from the medical industry, they would roll over for this as well.
I can even see it being sold as part of healthcare reform. After all, we don't trust doctors anymore, we don't trust science, surely AI would be more fair, more rational and ethical. AI can't be paid off by big pharma to push pills you don't need. AI doesn't care what race or gender you are. AI doesn't get exhausted after a 24 hour rotation. Costs would go down, quality would go up. That would be the pitch anyway. The rest would be in the fine print, not a sign in front of the hospital.
I don't want to live in that world, but I can see a path to it from where we are now. I think some kind of legal personhood for AI as a pretense to apply legal liability to AI is inevitable.
You’re painting a pretty dystopian picture of a hyper capitalist society where the rich have shaped the law in a way that the poor have no recourse. I think it could happen but it’s completely unrelated to anything AI and more to do with your government.
But what's the point of holding something accountable here? Creating an incentive for them to take your needs seriously? Why does an incentive matter if you already know that one has a superior expected outcome?
Human doctors and nurses are not accountable for outcomes, and they can not be accountable or our medical system (and any other medical system) would cease to function.
A nurse and doctor have personal liability in the US.
Imagine having to do paperwork as a nurse after working a 12 hour physical job, overnight, 8pm to 8am.
The idea mistakes happen because the nurse doesn't "care" is utter bullshit.
I think of how if I am really tired I just don't do anything that risky at my job until the next day. A nurse doesn't really have that option and it is all the highest risk there is. Every day, all day. All with a chronic, massive work shortage for dogshit pay.
The most brutal thing I have read about nursing are nurses saying the lucky people are the ones who failed out of nursing school.
This article makes me super angry. Ours is an Indian-American family from the SF bay area. 3 years ago, my son graduated from one of the top high schools in the bay area with a 4.0+ GPA and 1600 SAT, getting all 5's in his 9 STEM AP classes, and was not accepted into a single UC for CS and Math. His HS counselor had asked us to lower our hopes, saying "to the UCs, he's just another very smart Asian or Indian kid. He's a statistic." That year, none of his (very high achieving) Asian friends with high GPAs and SATs got into UC Berkeley, UCLA, or UCSD. I recall that my rant got a crazy battle started here on HN.
Since then, he's done very well at a non-California school, but I will forever be pissed at the UC system. They passed on a brilliant student in the service of DEI.
BTW, I saw in the article the 2 sample math questions that stumped much of UCB's incoming class. What a freaking joke.
The only cure: throw out the entire board that decides admission policies; they are all incompetent. Ask professors to decide on admissions, not sociology and gender studies graduates. Heavily weigh the SAT and GPA instead of the essay. Hopefully this brings back some sanity to the process.
Thought-provoking article, makes sense on some levels but it cuts too broadly.
For physical goods (clothes, purses,..) most buyers can discern high quality goods from bulk manufacturing with cheap materials. When it comes to digital goods, for movies, songs, books, etc. the buyer can discern a clear difference between AI- and human-generated, so the TEMU-fication argument is valid.
But for software engg, design, etc., I suspect that very few people can (or will be able to) discern the difference. There may be people who care about manual output, but then you have to come up with proof of manual work. Something like "prove to me that you have coded this application or designed this site without using AI". I don't see that happening.
I'm saying that people can't discern between human- and AI-built apps, because the vast majority of human-built apps are not any better than AI-built ones.
>>But that is not the case for AI. In AI, profit margins are higher the further you get from the end user, see chart below.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the following is true:
>>This is important because it means the AI boom's profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers.
I think that AI is adding value to customers who are paying for it, but the value is going mainly to the frontier labs and hyperscalers since they, and not applications, are doing the main burden.
> AI is adding value to customers who are paying for it,
That doesn't change the fact that "the AI boom's profits are currently being funded by investors"
> but the value is going mainly to the frontier labs and hyperscalers since they, and not applications, are doing the main burden.
It's pretty clear that "the AI boom's profits" refers precisely to the profits of these entities - which are being funded by investors. The customers aren't paying the full price, it's a subsidized affair, where the burden is doesn't matter in the slightest.
Hi, I am not a user of mechanical keyboards, but I did want to say nice work on the website. The fonts, the colors, the layout -- I loved it all! Good luck, hope you sell a lot of keyboards.
My (semi-educated) guess: it's about the quality, not quantity, of that revenue. If I opened their books, I expect to see lots of SMB customers with low deal sizes and non-trivial churn, non-sticky product usage, not many large enterprises signing up, and low NRR. Add a high customer acquisition cost in an undifferentiated space to complete the picture.
I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.
(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)
>>I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the feeling is strong, people will have a "bigger" reaction which in turn will make it more memorable.
I think in the near future, people will start filtering out movies that have a non-trivial share created by AI. (It remains to be seen what "non-trivial" means in this context.) I think a movie 100% generated by AI won't succeed. The story, the emotional impact, etc. all may be good, but people won't give it a chance.
> I think in the near future, people will start filtering out movies that have a non-trivial share created by AI.
I'm not _sure_ that's true? "Most people" know that McDonalds don't make the best burgers in their city - probably not even the best burgers in their neighbourhood. But they do make burgers that are reliably the same and for heaps of people "good enough" when things like price and availability and consistency are taken into account. And I don't blame then for that, for those people burger quality is a think that value less then me, and convenience is something they value more than me. They're not "wrong" just different.
Some of us will. I'm more concerned personally with books and music, and go well out of my way to make sure I'm buying then from "real people"(tm). The last few years most of my in cinema movie watching has been at a local cinema that screens classic movies. Recently I've seen a 70mm print of 2001 A Space Odyssey, 35mm prints of Blade Runner and Godfather. Last week we went to see the original Matrix I _know_ I'm not watching much AI generates film.
If we ever reach a point where we have that equivalence in media it'll be a sad day - when you can buy a ticket to a cheap but perfectly good movie written and directed by AI or you can pay a premium for something written by a human.
What does "100% generated" mean? Do you mean a movie executive told Claude to "make me a 100 million dollar blockbuster, make no mistakes" or do you mean that folks use generative tools to help write the screenplay, generate scenes, etc, or something else?
How much time has to pass before we can dismiss the widely cited predictions by the media (and also many popular bloggers and podcasters) that AI will lead to mass joblessness? Those people need to at the very least acknowledge that their forecasts are so far wrong.
To answer your question: It depends on your claim. All claims of mass unemployment thus far are evidently not true. All claims of mass unemployment in the near future: We'll have to wait and see.
The prediction that AI will lead to mass unemployment is largely a widespread fear more than an observation.
AI washing: On the one hand, you have periodic mass layoffs that could be related, but also could be "AI washing", with the companies citing AI to sound progressive when, in fact, they just over-hired.
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