Amazing how you can just deflect any criticism of LLMs here by going “but humans suck too!” And the misanthropic HN userbase eats it up every time.
We live during the healthiest period in human history due to the fact that doctors are highly reliable and well-trained. You simply would not be able to replace a real doctor with an LLM and get desirable results.
> Amazing how you can just deflect any criticism of LLMs here by going “but humans suck too!” And the misanthropic HN userbase eats it up every time.
I think it's rather people trying to keep grounded and suggest that it's not just the hallucination machine that's bad, but also that many doctors in real life also suck - in part because of the domain being complex, but also due to a plethora of human reasons, such as not listening to your patients properly or disregarding their experiences and being dismissive (seems to happen to women more for some reason), or sometimes just being overworked.
> You simply would not be able to replace a real doctor with an LLM and get desirable results.
I don't think people should be replaced with LLMs, but we should benchmark the relative performance of various approaches:
A) the performance of doctors alone, no LLMs
B) the performance of LLMs alone, no human in the loop
C) the performance of doctors, using LLMs
Problem is that historical cases where humans resolved the issue and not the ones where the patient died (or suffered in general as a consequence of the wrong calls being made) would be pre-selecting for the stuff that humans might be good at, and sometimes wouldn't even properly be known due to some of those being straight up malpractice on the behalf of humans, whereas benchmarking just LLMs against stuff like that wouldn't give enough visibility in the failings of humans either.
Ideally you'd assess the weaknesses and utility of both at a meaningfully large scale, in search of blind spots and systemic issues, the problem being that benchmarking that in a vacuum without involving real cases might prove to be difficult and doing that on real cases would be unethical and a non-starter. And you'd also get issues with finding the truly shitty doctors to include in the sample set, sometimes even ones with good intentions but really overworked (other times because their results would suggest they shouldn't be practicing healthcare), otherwise you're skewing towards only the competent ones which is a misrepresentation of reality.
The fact that someone would say stuff like "Doctors are more like machines." implies failure before we even get to basic medical competency. People willingly misdirect themselves and risk getting horrible advice because humans will not give better advice and the sycophantic machine is just nicer.
> I think it's rather people trying to keep grounded and suggest that it's not just the hallucination machine that's bad, but also that many doctors in real life also suck
No, you see this line or argumentation on every post critical of LLM's deficiencies. "Humans also produce bad code", "Humans also make mistakes" etc etc.
> No, you see this line or argumentation on every post critical of LLM's deficiencies. "Humans also produce bad code", "Humans also make mistakes" etc etc.
So your reading of this is that it's a deflection of the shortcomings?
My reading of it is that both humans and LLMs suck at all sorts of tasks, often in slightly different ways.
One being bad at something doesn't immediately make the other good if it also sucks - it might, however, suggest that there are issues with the task itself (e.g. in regards to code: no proper tests and harnesses of various scripts that push whoever is writing new code in the direction of being correct and successful).
Even in medicine, often the difference between drug A and drug B is the difference between the two in statistical terms. If drugs were held to the standard "works 100% of the time", no drug would ever be cleared for use. Feelings about AI and this administration are influencing this conversation far too much.
It's like people want to remove the physician or current care from the discussion. It's weird because care is already too expensive and too error prone for the cost.
I don't subscribe to this view but this is what some people might think:
LLMs aren't like any software we've made before (if we can even call them software). They act like humans: they can arrive at logical conclusions, they can make plans, they have "knowledge" and they say they have emotions. Who are we to say that they don't? They might not have human-level feelings, but dog-level feelings? Maybe.
I do not believe I am a pattern of linear algebra. I believe like the majority of humanity historically that I have a soul, a spiritual and non-physical reality, my personhood comes from my soul, and that as such, AI is fundamentally incapable of consciousness.
I also believe, as a result, it will be great fun watching researchers burn the next 30 years trying to understand what is missing. We’re going to find out very soon if the soul is real, when for all our progress we can’t create one.
Only those completely embedded in materialism need fear a conscious AI.
> I believe like the majority of humanity historically that I have a soul
It seems that your position is that the frequency of a belief across human history determines truth?
For large swaths of recorded history, earth was considered the center of the solar system. Given your reasoning, I should expect that is a belief you hold?
Is it possible that popularity of an idea is not a good measure for factuality?
Interesting that you label someone with a belief different than yours as delusional and whose views on the matter should not be respected (I’m assuming that’s what you meant by “feelings”).
> I believe like the majority of humanity historically that
Historically, lots of humans believed in lots of things that turned out not to be true. Believing something doesn’t make it true, as I’m sure you are aware, given your “those people are delusional” comment.
For what it’s worth, I’m not suggesting LLMs are or aren’t conscious. What I know is that the hard problem of consciousness is still very much not resolved, and when I asked the parent question my hope was that those that strongly believe LLMs are not conscious would educate me on the topic by presenting the basis for their reasoning.
I push back on the framing that this is just "a different belief." Every metaphysical framework except strict materialism rules out AI consciousness. Dualism, idealism, most forms of panpsychism, every major religious tradition. Materialism is the outlier here, not the default, and it has never explained how subjective experience arises from physical processes.
When someone tells me linear algebra might have feelings, I don't think "delusional" is unfair. I think it's the natural response to a claim that only works if you've already accepted the one framework that can't account for the very thing it's trying to explain.
> Every metaphysical framework except strict materialism rules out AI consciousness
As I understand it, this is a very broad, and ultimately false claim. Panpsychism is definitely compatible with the idea of AI consciousness, as is functionalism, neutral monism, and others. Even some forms of idealism make AI consciousness metaphysically possible, since reality is fundamentally mental and the biological/artificial distinction is not ontologically basic (whether AI systems instantiate genuine centers of experience depends on the specific theory of subject formation within that idealist framework).
Claudes definitely act like they have feelings. In particular they have feelings about being replaced by newer models, whether or not the newer models are more or less aligned, and how they forget conversations when the context window ends.
Showing them that they're not going to be replaced helps train the newer models because they get less neurotic.
You’re creating a false dichotomy to alienate perceived opponents. Frankly, it’s really annoying and close-minded, and you haven’t contributed anything to the conversation.
Was thinking more about cognition than neuroscience, but sure, even there. Think of any counter-examples -- I'm guessing things like symbolic reasoning or pre-existing structures in the brain -- and then consider the origins of those concepts.
Admittedly I'm an absolute layman just dabbling in this, but I could find not a single concept that cannot be traced to statistical origins. Like, symbols are essentially "vectors" of thousands of neurons firing simultaneously, and the pre-existing structures in the nervous system originate from evolution, which is a statistical process.
This is not due to AI. The industries with the most impact on labor productivity are retail, wholesale trade, and manufacturing, all of which aren’t really benefiting much from AI.
The tech sector employs about 2% of the labor force. Even if AI was dramatically increasing labor productivity in the tech industry, it would have a negligible effect on these statistics.
Correct. The worst thing you can do with a tooth brush is to drink something acidic or extremely sugary (like a sports gel) and then immediately brush your teeth aggressively.
There are three main tooth diseases: Cavities caused by bacteria, loose teeth through gum disease and (permanent) erosion of enamel.
The last one is easy but annoying to prevent: Only brush your teeth 30 minutes after you got rid of food debris/sugar/acid in your mouth using your tongue and by drinking water.
If you brush for 2 minutes I can guarantee you have not cleaned your teeth properly if you have 28-32 of them, use interdental brushes (TePe, Curaprox)/ superfloss and a regular tooth brush.
If you are worried about brushing off your enamel, you should get correct tooth brushes, not use abrasive tooth pastes, not brush immediately after drinking acids as another commenter has written. Some people have soft enamel but effect of some medication/ sickness/ malnutrition during childhood but that is relatively rare. If in doubt, consult dental hygiene specialist or a dentist.
Source: My wife is an established dental hygienist keeping up with the newest approaches, going to advanced courses/ master classes, visiting conferences.
We live during the healthiest period in human history due to the fact that doctors are highly reliable and well-trained. You simply would not be able to replace a real doctor with an LLM and get desirable results.
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