alt Hacker NewsI remember reading this New Yorker piece[0] when it came out 8 years ago about how the proliferation of electronic health records software in hospitals was driving older doctors towards retirement, and it made me ponder how many people hated using the software I've built professionally over the course of my career.
Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.
And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
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I always wondered why since the introduction of EHR systems do I have to fill out 5+ pages of personal information and medical history every time I visit a doctor, as if they have absolutely no records about me at all?
Interesting article. Another solution would be to try to reverse this trend, even the doctor in the article isn’t sure if things actually got better functionally by the end of it.
How would you reverse this trend, I dont know, but AI basically puts us in the same boat as the doctors in that article.
Probably most of them. Software has been very bad for a very long time. AI lets us flood people with trash a lost faster. In the past, I'd have said the software industry was producing mixed benefits, some improvements and some regressions, but on the whole probably a net positive.
Probably in 2015 or so, I think it started shifting towards a net negative -- and now, it's gone deeply and starkly into making the world a worse place.