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> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them un
by JacobiX 17d ago
> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.
This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"
- slfnflctd 17d agoOur culture and the socioeconomic structures it reinforces will not change easily. More than ever, I feel we need both grassroots activism and key players at the top of the hierarchy. Otherwise, it is all too obvious where most of the rewards from increased productivity will go. The wealth hoarding has got to be curtailed.
- throwawayqqq11 16d agoWhat changes fast thou, is economic structures and societal structures will follow. This is classic marx (base<->superstructure) or the power aspect of economics. One true dystopia i see possible, is mecha hitler slowly displacing and controlling (white collar) city dwellers to the point of silent obedience. This Anthropic article is imo propganda to buy time for shareholders and to delay potential stroms. Claiming AI as actors in a capitlistic system will fix systemic issues, is like claiming super sonic planes will fix world hunger.
- alphawhisky 17d agoCall me crazy, but maybe our healthcare shouldn't be a "cost driven system". Maybe that was the issue before AI. But hell, what do I know?
- JacobiX 17d ago[dead]
- Squarex 17d agoIt will always be until we have unlimited resources.
- sheauwn 17d agoCosts can continue to be a factor in something, it is in most things, without it being the "driver".
- lotsofpulp 17d agoWhat does cost driven system and driver even mean? The cost of something is the ratio of demand to supply. If something is not costing a lot, then it means there is sufficient supply that obtaining it is not going to require sacrifices elsewhere. If something does cost a lot, then it means there isn't sufficient supply, and obtaining it is going to require sacrifices elsewhere. Healthcare is obviously one of those things, especially with a top heavy population age histogram, where supply is not going to be sufficient so costs will remain high. And if costs are high, then obviously they will decide how resources get allocated, that is the very nature of something that is high cost.
- woah 17d agoIt is possible to spend an infinite amount of money keeping a human being alive, and every year there are more ways to spend more money keeping someone alive a little longer. Once you're not spending an infinite amount of money for each person, you are in the territory of denied claims, "death panels", waiting lists, and all the other things people like to complain about depending on their political persuasion.
- pessimizer 17d agoIt will always be the driver. The question is always going to be whether we spend X amount of resources to get Y probability of restoring Z health to someone (or someone to Z level of health.) Costs are just another way to say resources. If we only have $100, and it takes $100 to have a 33% chance to give Bob a 50% better life, but $50 to have a 15% chance to give either Sara or Rose a 100% better life, we need a rubric to make that decision. We can't just do first come first serve (maybe the first person in line takes all the health care for a 1% chance of getting 1% better), or pick the person we like better (who is we?). We have to figure out how to manage and grow the limited resources we have. We manage them by coming up with algorithms on how to spend money, and we grow them by cutting costs and investing. This is better when it is done in public through democratic means than when it is done behind closed doors (to avoid the above problems.) There will always be death panels. There are currently death panels. The reason for single-payer is not to avoid trying (imperfectly) to maximize these equations, it's to get rid of massive amounts of administration and graft (cutting costs.) If all that savings goes to the Pentagon, we wouldn't be any happier than before single-payer. But it's not good to come up with some fuzzy way to determine who gets treated. Efficient spending is a way of minimizing injustice. To say a health system is not being driven by costs is just another way of saying that it's going to be driven by undeclared and unexamined biases.
- nickpp 16d agoWhat exactly do you think should be the motivator for people working in healthcare then? For companies creating healthcare products and services? For investors pouring money into health care research? The goodness of their hearts?
- simianwords 17d ago> This feels economically naïve.. not really. almost all technological processes have increased the quality of the service.
- JacobiX 17d agoAir travel is a good counterexample here: technology made airlines far more productive, but much of the gain went into lower staffing, higher throughput, and cost cutting not a better passenger experience
- triceratops 17d agoTo be fair it is a better passenger experience at that price point.
- bitmasher9 17d agoI once saw a receipt for a cross-country train ride in the late 1950s and was shocked at the price. It was significantly slower and more expensive than a similar plane ticket today.
- brailsafe 17d agoThat tends to be true now as well for a variety of reasons. I'd be more interested in the cost then between both modes of travel.
- SoftTalker 17d agoYes, in the USA Amtrak tends to be quite a bit more expensive than the equivalent trip by air. And far slower. Maybe excluding some of the east coast commuter routes.
- brailsafe 17d agoVery different experience though. Fast and deeply uncomfortable vs long and chill. I'd prefer the latter when feasible but it obviously isn't always.
- cucumber3732842 17d ago>great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses" And outside of industries with government enforced perversions of simple "supply and demand" forces (we're not talking Nth level effects here) this means more access to the service or lower prices or both. Edit: Which is to say you won't see any benefit in healthcare but you will in a ton of other industries.
- lbreakjai 17d agoIn a market with perfect competition, perhaps. Healthcare is far closer to a monopoly. Since people can't decide not to be sick, it means you can pocket the cost-saving.
- dgellow 17d agoHealthcare is indeed the poster child for inelastic demand
- WalterBright 17d agoNot true. For every medical condition, there are a very large number of treatment options, with a wide variety of efficacy, pain, and cost. For example, I bet you could enumerate plenty of weight loss options off the top of your head.
- dgellow 16d agoLet me know where I can find all that competition for surgery
- WalterBright 16d agoA good doctor will present many options for you. I had hernia surgery a while ago. I went over the options with the surgeon, the varying surgical methods used, including doing nothing about it. Medicine is not "if A then B".
- 17d ago
- fg137 17d agoI didn't read the article but headed straight to comments because I cannot trust a single word Anthropic says about economy. They have an incentive to play dumb and talk as if AI is net positive for the world.
- dgellow 17d agoYep, I read it, that’s what this seems to be about
- sparklingmango 17d agoIt feels like propoganda.
- mekael 17d agoThat’s because it is. And not even well presented propaganda.
- OroPla 17d agoAs long as it is repeated often enough, everyone will accept it and most will also believe it. Even when corrected later, whatever was repeated more often will live on. This is why all the things you are supposed to believe are repeated and repeated and repeated some more.
- NickHirras 17d agoOne of the sections is: A profound economic transformation In the extreme scenario, AI is more productive than humans at the vast majority of knowledge-work tasks. It does nearly all of them autonomously, and it creates essentially no new knowledge tasks for people. This scenario would likely require recursively self-improving AI, adopted quickly for knowledge work. As AI diffuses, annual GDP growth rates reach 15% a year, leading the economy to double in size every 4.5 years. As a society, we’re far richer than we’ve ever been, but many fewer workers have jobs in knowledge work, and unemployment has risen beyond typical recessionary levels.
- fhejfnenjdcn 17d ago
- watwut 17d agoMoreover, the nurse is frustrated, because she lost whatever agency and autonomy she had before. Her job is now obey whay AI said instead of making decisions by herself.
- jdiff 17d agoMarshall Brain really nailed it back in 2003 with Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 AI leaves humans as the limbs of the machine, with less and less thinking or comprehension required on their part.
- morkalork 17d agoA reverse-centaur
- plastic-enjoyer 17d agoYeah, it will be assembly line working all over again.
- chrisjj 17d agoURL not responding here.
- jdiff 17d agoHm, also not responding here. I don't think this thread is well-trafficked enough to have hugged it to death, but here's a PDF alternative link: https://milweesci.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/4/13247648/mannapdf.pdf https://milweesci.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/4/13247648/mannap...
- chrisjj 16d agoThanks!
- yencabulator 16d agoHe died in 2024. The domain is paid for 10 years, but the hosting probably got shut off.
- randusername 17d agoThe whole idea that AI will usher in this utopia where workers in healthcare are able to realign their primary job functions with obvious value creation by sweeping all the paperwork under the rug is just silly. It will just fester out of sight and out of mind: audit bots and compliance bots and malpractice bots and insurance bots will arms race creating such a mess it will become unfixable.
- zhivota 17d agoThere's an optimistic future where Medicare becomes so much more efficient it becomes politically obvious to expand it because it's outperforming the mess that is private sector healthcare. With AI I could actually see this being a possibility since it doesn't depend on a huge army of competent employees in a government office.
- pydry 17d agoIt feels economically naive because theyre presuming LLMs are magical boxes that replace humans. I doubt 99% of what a nurse does would be meaningfully aided by an LLM and where it would help it'd probably be a crappy band aid around a bigger festering issue anyway (e.g. poorly managed IT, deliberately confusing insurance processes).
- JeremyNT 17d agoExactly. If their productivity fantasies are real, the precarious (and already very anti-worker) balance between capital and labor immediately disintegrates. Serious solutions to this would look like nationalizing tech companies, mandating shorter work weeks, seizing the assets of the oligarchs and redistributing them. Not... letting the invisible hand of the market sort it all out.
- bigbuppo 17d agoInvisible hands are the tool of pickpockets.
- boogieknite 17d agoyoure comment is getting to the real economic future: nursing unions will not sit back and let this happen. if the "productivity fantasies" (well said) are real this will get ugly. the competent nurses where i live are in strong unions
- WalterBright 17d agoThe industries with the highest costs - health care, housing, education - are the industries most heavily interfered with by the government. The industry with an absence of government interference, software, has seen prices drop to zero.
- throwawayqqq11 16d agoApples and oranges. You cannot allow certain vital services to be run profit driven, when you care about the quality of that service. Thats a nobrainer to me, because nobrain makes purchase descisions too. The IT sector in general doesnt deal with comparably vital services and is due to its immaterial nature much more competive. Driving costs to zero/minimum is a logical outcome of healthy free markets, which is a direct contradiction to profit driven enterprise. That is why Peter Tiel hates competition and my profit margins for eg, grocerie stores (healthy localized market) are quite low. The only way to satisfy the fiscal pressure, baked into the system and upheld by propaganda, of "get more or loose", is to cut spending/quality in such a market. And the only way to prevent that are institutions above the free markets slowly failing to deliver. This "slowly failing to deliver" is imo a key characteristic of late stage capitalism and i can see it everywhere (you too?). BC. in financialized economies, the incentive is elsewhere, than maintaining rural infra, "health care, housing, education".
- Gud 17d agoIt will bring down the prices for nursing and allow more people who previously couldn't afford health care to afford it, theoretically.
- thrance 17d agoHealthcare prices are not dictated by labor costs, but by how much the leeches who own everything are willing to charge people for it. For example, insulin is dirt cheap to make, yet billed at exorbitant amounts.
- FuriouslyAdrift 17d agoAt least in the US, the ACA recalibrated how insurance companies get re-imbursed. Their margains are set as a percentage of the payment that goes to direct care. If the prices go up and their margin ratio is fixed, then it is in their best interest for charges to go as high as possible. Same as everyone else in the supply chain. Everyone is suddenly making money hand over fist and the insured can't say no to the premiums. https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/health/aca-medical-loss-ratio-profit-paradox/ https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/health/aca-medical-loss-...
- arrowleaf 17d agoNo? Prices are market-driven in our society, not necessarily a function of labor costs. In the very long-term best case scenario, the increased profits going to the company from these efficiency gains may encourage more competitors to pop up, and either drive prices down or offer more for what you pay.
- engeljohnb 17d agoI know this is just an example, but I'm going to say this every time the subject comes up: since human lives are the cost of making the wrong decisions, AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker of any kind in healthcare. If my blood pressure crashes because my nurse is caring for 15 patients at once and didn't notice that the AI decided to pause my norepinephrine, I won't consider "the AI did it" to be any acceptable excuse.
- zahlman 17d agoI want to emphasize your point. As a basic matter of valuing humanity qua humanity, this holds even if the AI could be shown to make the decisions more accurately than a human could. In fact, especially in those circumstances, if we take the warnings of X-risk even slightly seriously.
- RigelKentaurus 17d agoNot to say that I don't agree with you to an extent, but you should see AI-delivered healthcare numbers to human-delivered and make it a fair comparison. From Google: "Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses. Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, following heart disease and cancer." It is highly possible that in a few years, AI will be a lot safer in the majority of healthcare situations.
- ryandrake 17d agoThe difference is that humans are at least supposed to be accountable for those 250,000 errors. Those humans can naturally care about doing a good job, or they can be motivated to care. They can fear consequences and take pride in avoiding mistakes. AI can do none of this, and cannot be held accountable for mistakes. I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes.
- jurgenburgen 17d ago
- d3dd 17d agoIt shows a complete lack of understanding of what these people actually do.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- vkou 17d agoMeanwhile, costs will somehow go up by 40%.
- pezezin 17d agoMy dad is a retired nurse. Most of his work was giving shots, treating wounds, extracting blood, putting IV catheters, etc. In other words, physical tasks. How is an "AI agent" or LLM going to take care of that?
- derektank 17d agoObviously not an LLM, but AI models + robotics are likely to automate many healthcare tasks in the long term and are already beginning to automate tasks like blood draws. The Aletta autonomously handles each step of the blood draw, while a trained phlebotomist initiates each session and remains available to respond to any issues throughout. The device guides the patient to position their arm, after which the patient or supervisor presses a button to start the blood draw. The Aletta then uses near-infrared light and Doppler ultrasound to locate a suitable vein and tell it apart from arteries. If no appropriate vein is found, the device will not attempt the procedure. Once a vein is identified, the Aletta proceeds through the remaining steps on its own: applying a tourniquet, preparing the skin, inserting and disposing of the needle, changing collection tubes and placing a bandage. The supervising phlebotomist confirms that collection tubes are filled in the correct order and verifies that all tubes are adequately full following the procedure. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-authorizes-first-its-kind-robotic-blood-draw-device https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-auth...
- beachy 17d agoWhen I watch medical professionals at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through notes, talking to others or waiting for results from some lab down the hall. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks. I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in the hospital tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a public health system.
- pezezin 17d agoThis was also a public health system (Spain), but I guess it might depend on the country. Now that you mentions labs, he spent the last 10 years of his career (maybe more, I don't remember clearly) working at a food analysis lab and there was a lot of waiting for results there, but it is what it is, microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster.
- marginalia_nu 17d agoAnthropic is eyeing an IPO. Of course they're spinning a narrative where their product will reshape the entire economy. They have a vested interest in doing so in the most literal sense of the meaning.
- pj_mukh 17d agoActually it is “great, now this nurse can bathe and give company to two patients instead of one with her paperwork otherwise taken card of”
- nostrademons 17d agoNurses do actually end up spending more time with patients, it's just that they spend more time with rich patients. The actual, tangible form this is taking right now is concierge medicine, home health aids, private practice, etc. My wife's (very good) ob-gyn had enough of working in institutionalized medicine where she's paid about what a L4 FANG engineer makes and pretty much has to follow the script that the health-care system dictates, and quit. Now she does perimenopause consultations for FANG execs at $1200/hour. My uphill neighbors are in their 90s. I think the wife was in VC or something back in the 70s and 80s. There's a steady stream of nurses and home health aids up to their property. Seems like they've got a full care team working out of their home. Across industry and industry, we see the same pattern. The mass-market product gets cheaper and less labor intensive, at the expense of any human touch. Everybody displaced, if they're any good and wants to stay in the field, moves up-market to do custom professional services for rich people. They pay for it, because if you want people to do good work for you, you have to pay them more than they can get otherwise.
- bmitc 17d agoThis has a surprisingly easy solution: get rid of the rich. It's never, in the history of the world, been in anyone's favor, except the oligarchy, to privatize everything.
- austhrow743 16d agoUse technological gains to reduce costs while maintaining results hasn't been the historical rule for healthcare so I think you should say what makes this technological gain unique.
- xg15 16d agoYeah, this whole blog was repeating the old fairy tale narrative of automation "if we automate the work then workers will have sooo much more time!" I'm surprised they expect people to still believe that stuff.