alt Hacker News> 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"
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I 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.
Our 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.
I 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.
My 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?
Use 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.
It shows a complete lack of understanding of what these people actually do.
Anthropic 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.
The 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.
Actually it is “great, now this nurse can bathe and give company to two patients instead of one with her paperwork otherwise taken card of”
It will bring down the prices for nursing and allow more people who previously couldn't afford health care to afford it, theoretically.
Moreover, 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.
Meanwhile, costs will somehow go up by 40%.
Call 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?
It 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).
Exactly. 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.
> This feels economically naïve..
not really. almost all technological processes have increased the quality of the service.
>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.
Nurses 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.