Its been a month since the last time I went on this same tangent but neural networks, their history, their potential, and the intentions behind those who pioneered them are actually all really fucking incredible and cool and it cannot be emphasized enough how unfairly they've been perverted by capitalism right now. Some of you think you understand that but I still see you very quick to dismiss that there was ever any merit to the technology at all.
The data centers aren't needed for it to exist, or even for it to be used for entertainment or novelty. The data centers are because it's being crammed into a billion times more than that, because they're inserting it into literally everything several billion people are using every second of every day.
I remember years ago reading about how excited medical researchers were, because they created one of those that scanned like, 20,000 healthy scans of tissue, and a thousand scans of unhealthy tissue, and they started feeding it scans of tissue and it would identify healthy from unhealthy tissue with a staggeringly high accuracy rate? I remember it was being touted as a medical breakthrough.
This is still advancing as far as I know. Picking things out from sets is one thing that it's best at!
But there's a downside we unfortunately all could have guessed, too, which is that actual doctors using ai assistance become more careless and lazy at doing it themselves.
https://archive.ph/whVMI
...On the other hand, though, pretty much all medical work has BEEN understaffed, pretty much always, and the staff they have is therefore constantly over-worked, right?
Virtually everyone is overworked in all industries. That's...the original reason we wanted robots.
So I have to wonder, like, is it also possible the human's "20% drop in effectiveness" is just what it looks like when something else can shoulder what was already unhealthy burden? Was the average doctor doing 20% more than the human brain and body was really comfortable handling? Would their personal efficiency have also similarly dropped a bit if they just had more human help, too?
This has still been a net positive where it's been implemented, with the combination of computer and human saving more lives together, but when lives are on the line we obviously still want both of those at their best.
