helicalmix

I think it's totally fair to be skeptical, but it's also not rare to have interventions that are astoundingly effective.

Antibiotics and vaccines may not be completely free lunches, but they're very good at what they do.

The transformer paper was published in 2017, and within 8 years (less so, if i'm being honest), we have bots that passed the Turing test. To people with shorter term memories, passing the turing test was a big deal.

My point is that even if things are pleatuing, a lot of these advancements are done in step change fashion. All it takes is one or two good insights to make massive leaps, and just because things are plateauing now, it's a bad predictor for how things will be in the future.

> So healthier customers means their profit is 5% of SMALLER_NUMBER.

I don't think this is completely true right? Rather, it's more accurate to say that customers that are seen as healthier get to pay less premiums, but customers that are seen as unhealthy have to pay more.

In both scenarios, you, as the insurance company, still want to be minimizing the amount of care you actually pay for.

In other words, to maximize profits, it seems like the best customer is one that's high risk (high premiums), but less likely to require a catastrophic payout. In which case, it feels like an obese high risk patient on ozempic seems like a pretty solid deal.

can you explain this statement to me more? I think i'm missing something

hmm...doesn't this possibly incentivize ozempic subsidies even more?

If you know a "customer" of yours (an individual employee) is only going to be with you until they either change jobs or go on Medicare, then it seems the name of the game then is to make sure that nothing catastrophic happens to them until you can hand them off to someone else.

In which case, they should definitely go on ozempic. Even if the effects of ozempic immediately come off after usage, it's a short-term enough solution that benefits the insurance company, no?

this is not intuitive to me. In your description, it feels like capital more closely resembles carrots then whips?

also, the person's only source of wages isn't going to be specifically making sandwiches for just you, no?

hm, maybe we're misinterpreting each other's main point.

My reply was to some person who said that AI was akin to astrology, i.e. absolutely fake bullshit, which is bonkers to me.

Your reply was that AI, like 3d printing, is likely not going to be mass adopted by the average consumer, despite the hype, which i think is a reasonable prediction, and doesn't necessarily mean it won't have some valuable applications.

Maybe just agree to agree?

sorry, maybe i'm not completely understanding what you mean by "in consumer products".

reading your argument on reddit, it seems to me that you don't consider 3d printing a success because there's not one in every home...which is true.

but it feels uncreative? like, sure, just because it hasn't been mass adopted by consumers, doesn't mean there wasn't value generation done on an industrial level. you're probably using consumer products right now that have benefitted from 3d printing in some way.

> ML absolutely has an applicable location, it's not nearly as vast as the hype train would say

what hype train are you referring to? i know a lot of different predictions in machine learning, so i'm curious about what you mean specifically.

> It may feel like a normal conversation but is a Chinese Room on steroids.

Can you prove that humans are not chinese rooms on steroids themselves?

i feel like a common consumer fallacy is that, because you don't interact with a technology in your day-to-day life, it leads you to conclude that the technology is useless.

I guarantee you that the cloud has benefitted you in some way, even though you aren't aware of the benefits of the cloud.

which hype cycles are you referring to? and, after the dust settled, do you conclusively believe nothing of value was generated from these hype cycles?

sure, but we're not discussing the outsourcing of human companionship in this context. we're discussing the capabilities of current technology.

this is a different thesis than "AI is basically bullshit astrology", so i'm not disagreeing with you.

Understanding atomic energy gave us both emission-free energy and the atomic, and you are correct that we can't necessarily where the path of AI will take us.