alt Hacker NewsI RFTA and the majority of the complaints are about call center metrics and the pressure to ration care. These are real concerns about misuse of metrics, but not AI. The AI empathy thing was a 2024 pilot that was discontinued.
FWIW my wife works for Kaiser and finds a lot of value in the the medical LLM tools available to her. She tells me being able to do live translation, summarize notes, and quickly get comprehensive answers save her time and help her give better care. Her older patients also frequently come in bringing AI-powered alerts from their apple watches that detected cardiac events.
It's annoying that we use broad terms to describe a set of technologies that in some ways can be problematic and in another ways are very beneficial. We gotta evaluate each of these as they come rather than talk about blanket bans.
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> AI-powered alerts from their apple watches that detected cardiac events
Surely these are “good old-fashioned AI” (statistical learning) and not LLM, though.
I just want to be clear that the “medical LLM” tools are the new ones, and the Apple Watch alerts aren’t.
Cardiac events from Apple Watches is not “AI” though
Just for clarification, is your wife a doctor or a nurse?
everyone is very thirsty for AI hate, so its not unexpected. Today its a mixed bag of corpo hate, anxiety about the future, inequality and traditional class warfare, combined with the typical technical ignorance.
I would expect companies to blend shit metrics with AI systems, if not at Kaiser then at other places. People lack imagination and using AI to monitor your workforce has to be one of the possibly worst ways to use it. Alternatively some dickhead will "lean startup" their way into measuring "performance" in such a way with the "help" of AI that they will do something even worse.
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I personally will not use a provider who uses llm tools. I know it makes me and my coworkers less careful and lazier. Qualities I dont want in a health care providor.
Ive actually moved primary care physicians over this once already, found the oldest guy I could who barely knows how to use a laptop but spends a bunch of extra time with me.
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Things like this are (sadly) common (and age-old) problems with automation and computerization. (For a vivid account of this phenomenon, check out the novel _Close to the Machine_, by Ellen Ullman.)
As executives and analysts increasingly use the "AI" craze to push automation and computerization (and layoffs) generally, even aside from AI proper, it should not be surprising that the individuals and groups opposing those moves also use the same labels.
The lack of precision in language here sucks. It sucks for the discourse and it also sucks when it comes to focusing anger and productive energy on the core problems (obfuscation of human responsibility, erosion of human agency, declining institutional flexibility, deprofessionalization, etc.). But it doesn't begin with the critics of AI.