Technology

I may have become too cynical but, as is often the case when you dig deeper, this sounds like the result of lobbyists trying to protect licensing rather than people.

We can be dumb, but we’ve been doing web searches for legal and medical advice for ages because it is too damned expensive and time consuming to go to professionals for every little thing. Not to mention, doctors have so little time for you that it is hard to get them to listen to the whole story to make connections between symptoms.

The LLMs already tell you that they aren’t licensed professionals and, for many, provide citations for their sources (miles better than your typical health website).

As a personal anecdote, my son was having stomach pain but was planning to tough it out. He checked with ChatGPT and it recommended he go to the ER. He did, and if he hadn’t, he would likely be dead now. He spent 3 days in the hospital having his bowels unobstructed through a tube in his nose.

There is value in people having that kind of information at their fingertips.

Regulation is absolutely needed, but I would rather they focus on protecting us from AI being used for military purposes, mass surveillance, etc. rather than protecting citizens from ourselves.