"A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities.
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@OneInterestingFact @remixtures My understanding is that (if we accept that what we're dealing with qualifies as "intelligence", which I really only do to avoid derailing conversations away from their topics) LLMs are a specific application of the larger field of machine learning.
Unless I'm wrong there is relatively little to LLMs that is specific to them and not machine learning at large, but please correct me if I am.
@renardboy @OneInterestingFact @remixtures I see the big divide as being between chatbots versus classifiers. There are other things that could reasonably be called AI given how people use the term, but chatbots and classifiers are the two things that are frequently discussed in general discourse, and purposefully conflated.
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@wronglang @remixtures thankfully programmers, politicians and CEOs aren’t susceptible to those, though. /s
@unkx @remixtures would anybody notice if a CEO got replaced by a machine that makes up shit people want to hear?
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"are Henry Ford's assembly lines de-skilling coach builders?"
same energy and despite my huge reservations about the current private ownership and direction of AI I'm feeling that lots of AI scepticism is missing the point. It's private ownership and capitalism that are the threats as usual, not technology.
@steviesyerda @remixtures I'm not sure I get your point here. Ford didn't deskill coach builders, he didn't hire coach builders, and cars forced coach builders out of business, but didn't degrade their skills.
Did the assembly line degrade overall skills for car builders? Maybe there is something there, but I would argue that skill *increased* for the step that people were completing on the line, and that's definitely not happening for vibe-coders
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@steviesyerda @remixtures I'm not sure I get your point here. Ford didn't deskill coach builders, he didn't hire coach builders, and cars forced coach builders out of business, but didn't degrade their skills.
Did the assembly line degrade overall skills for car builders? Maybe there is something there, but I would argue that skill *increased* for the step that people were completing on the line, and that's definitely not happening for vibe-coders
the whole point of Fordism was to gain control of skilled labour, de-skill it onto an assembly line and thus gain control over the intensity and outputs from production. What was lost were the artisan trade skills. My comment was reflecting a similar change in the article and study. Professionals being de-skilled, potentially higher productivity using technology, but possibly a loss of quality replaced by a gain of quantity in assessments.
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Essentially, when "someone else does it", the specialists became "managers of the someone else that does it". It would be exactly the same if the entity they were managing was a human.
In coding too, people going into management famously have their leet skillz (should they have had any) turn to crap, since they are guiding how it is done by other now, not working at the coalface.
Since it's no longer used, the skill starts to degrade. It's normal and making space for new skills that are useful.
It's a mistake to get hung up on skills that were useful for a while and aren't any more. Sitting in front of a PC all day doing things machines now do better is not some sad loss, it's good news.
@hopeless @remixtures that would be true if the machines actually did it better.
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the whole point of Fordism was to gain control of skilled labour, de-skill it onto an assembly line and thus gain control over the intensity and outputs from production. What was lost were the artisan trade skills. My comment was reflecting a similar change in the article and study. Professionals being de-skilled, potentially higher productivity using technology, but possibly a loss of quality replaced by a gain of quantity in assessments.
@steviesyerda @remixtures I mean, I think I get that, but for medical diagnosis, it's bad to reduce quality, and if you increase quantity, that multiplies the bad effect of the loss in quality.
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@remixtures No one will have the skills to conduct research on unskilling in a decade.
@BLTpizza @remixtures According to recent discussions that I had about AI, _only_ the unskilled can do research on unskilling (and you have to be drunk three days a week to talk about alcoholism)
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@steviesyerda @remixtures I mean, I think I get that, but for medical diagnosis, it's bad to reduce quality, and if you increase quantity, that multiplies the bad effect of the loss in quality.
@mu @remixtures I agree but then call centres are way less effective than face to face but that doesn't stop health providers using them to churn through as many people as possible. We should be realistic about the forces driving AI adoption, they're the same ones as drove Fordism.
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Friends:
did any of you actually bother to click thru and read the abstract of the endoscopy study ??
anyone ???
cause to my eyes, if you read the abstract in this pay walled article, despite the authors claim of statistical significance, the numbers are not convincing
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @remixtures @aptitude @dasgrueneblatt @steviesyerda @mkljczk 52 sounds about a few large hospitals worth of doctors, which sounds like it's basically the whole of polish endoscopic community or at least a big chunk of it. 37 million people don't need much endoscopy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Poland
Github repo of transcripts:
https://github.com/safety-research/how-ai-impacts-skill-formation
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@mu @remixtures I agree but then call centres are way less effective than face to face but that doesn't stop health providers using them to churn through as many people as possible. We should be realistic about the forces driving AI adoption, they're the same ones as drove Fordism.
@steviesyerda @remixtures I think the forces that are driving AI adoption are generally grifting + advertising.
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"A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities. The physicians, who had all performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyses colonoscopy images in real time and flags a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called an adenoma. The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not on others.
Once physicians began using it, their performance dropped significantly whenever the system was unavailable. During the three-month period before the AI tool was introduced, the specialists found at least one adenoma during 28.4% of colonoscopies. During the three-month period after the tool was introduced, the adenoma detection rate for colonoscopies performed without AI assistance decreased to 22.4%.
Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even highly skilled professionals might get worse at tasks that their job requires as they become more dependent on AI tools, says Robert Wachter, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who is the author of a book on how AI tools are transforming health care. The study authors say that continuous exposure to such tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.
Co-author Yuichi Mori, a physician-researcher at the University of Oslo, says that more studies are needed to confirm the phenomenon. But people who use AI tools should be aware that they risk losing some of their skills, he adds. “There is no established solution against deskilling right now. It should be a very hot research topic in the next decade.”"
@remixtures almost as if #AIslop acts like self-lobotomization…
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"A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities. The physicians, who had all performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyses colonoscopy images in real time and flags a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called an adenoma. The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not on others.
Once physicians began using it, their performance dropped significantly whenever the system was unavailable. During the three-month period before the AI tool was introduced, the specialists found at least one adenoma during 28.4% of colonoscopies. During the three-month period after the tool was introduced, the adenoma detection rate for colonoscopies performed without AI assistance decreased to 22.4%.
Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even highly skilled professionals might get worse at tasks that their job requires as they become more dependent on AI tools, says Robert Wachter, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who is the author of a book on how AI tools are transforming health care. The study authors say that continuous exposure to such tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.
Co-author Yuichi Mori, a physician-researcher at the University of Oslo, says that more studies are needed to confirm the phenomenon. But people who use AI tools should be aware that they risk losing some of their skills, he adds. “There is no established solution against deskilling right now. It should be a very hot research topic in the next decade.”"
> It should be a very hot research topic in the next decade.
Probably not. There won’t be scientists any more who are skilled enough to do such a study.
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@hopeless @remixtures that would be true if the machines actually did it better.
@mu @remixtures You seem to be implying machines don't do "it" better... what "it" are we talking about?
Anything at all? Clearly you would be wrong.
Coding? They certainly can do it better / faster... at the same time they can produce crap if not treated how you would treat a junior on your team.
ML colon cancer matching? The article doesn't really say. Presumably if they're using it on real scans of real humans, they have some minimal experience-based faith in it.
It's good at what it's good at... generally over time those things will increase. If every single thing about AI has to be met with a sneer, eventually reality is going to intrude in an unlubed way.
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"A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities. The physicians, who had all performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyses colonoscopy images in real time and flags a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called an adenoma. The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not on others.
Once physicians began using it, their performance dropped significantly whenever the system was unavailable. During the three-month period before the AI tool was introduced, the specialists found at least one adenoma during 28.4% of colonoscopies. During the three-month period after the tool was introduced, the adenoma detection rate for colonoscopies performed without AI assistance decreased to 22.4%.
Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even highly skilled professionals might get worse at tasks that their job requires as they become more dependent on AI tools, says Robert Wachter, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who is the author of a book on how AI tools are transforming health care. The study authors say that continuous exposure to such tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.
Co-author Yuichi Mori, a physician-researcher at the University of Oslo, says that more studies are needed to confirm the phenomenon. But people who use AI tools should be aware that they risk losing some of their skills, he adds. “There is no established solution against deskilling right now. It should be a very hot research topic in the next decade.”"
@remixtures Shocking, so a fully automated diagnostic system is better than humans who gradually move to other tasks where they can be better employed. Really shocking. Where did I already see such a pattern? Mmmmm
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@mu @remixtures You seem to be implying machines don't do "it" better... what "it" are we talking about?
Anything at all? Clearly you would be wrong.
Coding? They certainly can do it better / faster... at the same time they can produce crap if not treated how you would treat a junior on your team.
ML colon cancer matching? The article doesn't really say. Presumably if they're using it on real scans of real humans, they have some minimal experience-based faith in it.
It's good at what it's good at... generally over time those things will increase. If every single thing about AI has to be met with a sneer, eventually reality is going to intrude in an unlubed way.
@hopeless @remixtures you were the one who said "it" in your post?
I think LLMs can generate (bad) code, I don't think that's the same as writing software.
There used to be a saying "bad coders measure lines of code, good coders measure how many lines they delete, great coders measure how many lines of code they don't write" by that logic, I think LLMs are bad coders.
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@hopeless @remixtures you were the one who said "it" in your post?
I think LLMs can generate (bad) code, I don't think that's the same as writing software.
There used to be a saying "bad coders measure lines of code, good coders measure how many lines they delete, great coders measure how many lines of code they don't write" by that logic, I think LLMs are bad coders.
@hopeless @remixtures why do you think it's going to get better? It's pretty much hit a plateau for more than a year now.
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@donaldball @wandrecanada @remixtures But they're not automating innovation, they're automating duplication of effort.
Well they‘re not automating de-duplication of effort. That seems pretty sure.
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@steviesyerda @remixtures I mean, I think I get that, but for medical diagnosis, it's bad to reduce quality, and if you increase quantity, that multiplies the bad effect of the loss in quality.
The less money they spend on actually helping people, the more profits they make
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the whole point of Fordism was to gain control of skilled labour, de-skill it onto an assembly line and thus gain control over the intensity and outputs from production. What was lost were the artisan trade skills. My comment was reflecting a similar change in the article and study. Professionals being de-skilled, potentially higher productivity using technology, but possibly a loss of quality replaced by a gain of quantity in assessments.
The only difference between AI and earlier technologies is that the earlier technologies had economies of scale. They got cheaper the more infrastructure you built for them. This is a big factor in monopolization that started in the 1800s, with things like the emergence of machinery, large scale chemical engineering, and the development of railroads. It was cost effective to companies of all kinds to build out infrastructure and machinery because they paid out more than they originally put into it. (Ignoring the cost of externalities, anyways) (Why should we care about the proles /s)
AI does not have this benefit. It is objectively a money pit that is owned by a small handful of companies that is in addition propped up by predatory pricing. When the companies actually have to pay the cost of AI then they will stop using it
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The only difference between AI and earlier technologies is that the earlier technologies had economies of scale. They got cheaper the more infrastructure you built for them. This is a big factor in monopolization that started in the 1800s, with things like the emergence of machinery, large scale chemical engineering, and the development of railroads. It was cost effective to companies of all kinds to build out infrastructure and machinery because they paid out more than they originally put into it. (Ignoring the cost of externalities, anyways) (Why should we care about the proles /s)
AI does not have this benefit. It is objectively a money pit that is owned by a small handful of companies that is in addition propped up by predatory pricing. When the companies actually have to pay the cost of AI then they will stop using it
AI does not have the benefit to companies that is warranted by its actual economic costs.
