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At some point, it'll become acceptable to us when an AI shuts off life support for a patient at a hospital because it "calculated" the odds of survival (piefed.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 week ago* by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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I'm not sure if I just thought this up sitting on the tiles in my shower room or if I dreamt it, but still.

Edit: I'm being cynical and I hate our blind faith in and reliance on LLMs.

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[–] 9 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I think your being a little to zoom in on the technicalities of modern day ai to tell the trees from the forest.

I am a bundle of connected neurons, effectively a neural network, i can calculate just fine.

Humans are “in general” horrible at doing math but thats besides the point of being capable of it.

Modern humans have a calculator in their pocket and we use it as a tool to make our own conclusions. Like ways “current day” ai often has acces to a calculator tool to do the same. Sure this is not ai doing the actual math but in practice its the same as a human with a calculator.

But the topic at hand is not even about current day ai but about hypotethical future ai that “somehow” is trusted enough to pull the plug on machines that keep a sick human alive.

Such future ai. If it would ever exist would have acces to such tools, possibly more complex tools to calculate odds of survival using (hopefully) a formula with a great number of input variables to consider all kinds of situations.

I would imagine such to be a known formula that humans could also independantly measure and calculate ending in a % chance of a survival. But somehow in this hypothetical future this would be a job given to ai.

So the question is less can ai solve math and more can we trust ai to interptet humam measuring tools to then put those values in a known formula tool to then act appropriatly on the results of said tool, and not at any point misalign/hallucinate.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    Ok but then why call it AI?

    We don't have to dream about a distant future to find a thing that can do math for us. It's called a computer, and if it's in our home, it might even be a personal computer. In fact, we have them smaller and faster, and they have fancy designs and can communicate to the world but it turns out they got a small chip inside that does a bunch of arithmetic binary operations and then a lot of them also have a chip inside them that can quickly operate on huge matrices of values. We call those cpus and gpus respectively.

    What I'm saying is, if it's just a threshold of different values, we were capable of making such a machine already, even before AI. And if it's an interpretative opinion, it turns out AI is notoriously bad at those.

    So the only thing an AI actually helps with is to do something when we don't know how. But the issue was never how. Now there's something to be said about the predictability of death but there's an insane amount of compounding factors that contribute to this. An AI could maybe be trained on a subset of factors but the truth is, we don't have good input and output data, that's why AI won't help us here.

    I'm not saying this to be pedantic, I'm making a point: even IF we decide that actually ethically it's fine for a machine to decide when someone has to die - which is quite a big leap - even then an AI won't be better than a human, so there's no point. And there's no way to make this look good, no way to sell this to the broader populus. I just don't see any way where this scenario is possible, let alone probable.

    And I think that's important, because it's very easy to slide down this slippery slope, interpolate a time series forecast in our head and essentially conclude "it's going downhill so the future must be what our average dystopia predicted" and I don't think that's right or even helpful. There's quite a few things we should improve and our world is on the brink of a bigger societal change again, but change is never just bad. Change is an opportunity to improve the things that are important to us. And to do this, we need all the brilliant minds that see those issues to imagine those improvements, so we should make sure we know what needs to be done when we finally get the chance.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago

    And I think that’s important, because it’s very easy to slide down this slippery slope, interpolate a time series forecast in our head and essentially conclude “it’s going downhill so the future must be what our average dystopia predicted” and I don’t think that’s right or even helpful. There’s quite a few things we should improve and our world is on the brink of a bigger societal change again, but change is never just bad. Change is an opportunity to improve the things that are important to us. And to do this, we need all the brilliant minds that see those issues to imagine those improvements, so we should make sure we know what needs to be done when we finally get the chance.

    This is really beautiful. I just wish capitalism didn't stand in the way of science, medicine and altruism.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Thats really funny that your way for an AI to solve a problem is have something else solve the problem then claim ownership.

    Like would it not be simpler in almost all cases to just use the tool directly?

    Otherwise youre introducing an intentionally difficult to quantify number of errors.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    Spoken like a peasant capable of critical thought.

    The corporate overlords who want to replace humans with ai don't like workers who can think for themselves, they have zero interests in building better tools for humans.

    They dream of robot slaves who keep them unaccountable for any “accidents”

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