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dsigntoday at 3:54 PM3 repliesview on HN

I think the guy is right on point at least when it comes to therapies. But he is also missing one major angle: we are no longer in control; our systems are. If we were to vote on the issue, I suspect that a narrow majority would prefer cheaper housing, and a total majority would prefer cancer to be cured. But there's no direct mechanism of any kind to exercise that vote. Not in USA, not in Europe, not in China. When/where there's democracy, nobody runs in a campaign of advancing immune therapies[^1]. The closest proxy we have to a vote is "regulated markets", and my recent experience losing a loved one to cancer taught me that cancer is not a disease for the streams of money moving through that system. Far from it.

I'm frankly pessimist that we will be able to fix those systems in a humanist way, at least not in my lifetime. If we were any good at it, we wouldn't have extreme inequality, nor our educations systems would be in tatters, and we wouldn't cast ballots propping up politicians whose best skill is ragebait.

However, if fixing the system is not an option, access to cheap technology and intelligence could help a lucky few circumvent those systems. And guess what the lucky few at the head of the AI companies will say then... Not necessarily the worst outcome, since most people will find more viable to equip a private biolab in the basement of their countryside manor than fixing the medical system of first world economies.

[^1] For the record, I think that would be better than running on xenophobic slogans.


Replies

bunderbundertoday at 4:00 PM

Essence of Decision is a great book that explores this idea. It looks at different models for understanding how organizations make decisions, and arrives at broadly the same conclusion: a model that assumes people are particularly in control is inadequate for explaining real world events.

RandomLensmantoday at 3:58 PM

Just wanting to cure cancer doesn't mean it would be accomplished - vote or not.

show 1 reply
gchamonlivetoday at 4:03 PM

Two possible assumptions here are that systems are actually in control and that there isn't anyone looking, while we saw that if things get too heated the US govt can sweep in and shut things down. The reasons for it might be debatable -- I'm more inclined to believe that that actually played nicely into the hype train launched by Anthropic around Mythos -- but there is always a bigger dog watching.

The other assumption is that these systems are failing by accident when in fact a stronger argument can be made that they are like this by design.