I have two observations.

1) My wife trained as a typesetter on a photo typesetting machine. That was already replacing typesetters working with lead, and the people sorting the used lead, and working with inks etc. They still needed a past-up artist and more. Eventually the GUI based computer arrived, with PageMaker, Quark, Indesign etc. These days she is super productive with a massive online icon library available, full printing and distribution capabilities. Able to do a job that could have involved half a dozen or more people previously.

Are those people unemployed now? Not really (we are talking 1.5 generation now, so not the same people). Unemployment levels are low, and the workforce is significantly larger, with men and women working. The working (outside of the home) part of the population has gone up significantly over a few generations, despite all the new enabling productive tech.

What I see is a lot of visually higher quality work being delivered, but often with the same core content. So productivity has increased, but you get a glossy new shiny report in a PDF, instead of a photocopy of a typewritten page. (Yes, I do simplify. But I think you get the gist.)

2) I started as a system admin, the a systems analyst, worked through project manager, etc. until I was leading startups. In the space where I work now, circular economy and food production, there is so much work to do, that any AI support we can get is welcome. But as the work is innovative, new and not done before, most often the AI tools aren’t that useful, yet. That may change, but with a society that needs to replace a significant part of the infrastructure and processes to achieve a long term sustainable society, I actually don’t worry the AI tools will take my job or any of my colleagues job away. There is plenty to do. I have enough new things in front of me that I could probably keep a whole big venture fund occupied for a long time.

This reminds me of some claims I've heard about domestic cooking and baking. Supposedly recipes got more sophisticated as we developed machinery like blenders and more pre-processed ingredients to make work quicker which ultimately resulted in time to cook or bake when hosting guests to take roughly the same amount of time as before. The dishes were just more elaborate.

Same with finance, we could all live an upper-middle-class life with all the luxury, for one parent working in the home, if we were willing to live the same lifestyle as the 1950s. But life today is much easier than even then — and we’d rather pay more for that extra luxury than live the spartan lifestyle that would’ve been luxury then.

I think that's a bold claim. Many things that were cheap then are now unreachably expensive. Many careers that paid well then are gone. The converse is also true; many things that were unreachably expensive then are cheap now, but that doesn't mean that we can easily live such lifestyles if we choose to. Forgoing a cellphone and seatbelts doesn't make it easy to afford a bungalow! Nor is such a lifestyle even legal, in many cases. And you won't find a payphone to call your family. The world moves around us, and it's not a matter of choice to be pulled along.

People pay top dollar to live like we lived then.

What's an example of this?

This is just flat out untrue for a variety of reasons. People need to stop thinking of 1945-1975 as "the norm," it was a world historic anomaly that was a direct response to earlier events- the economy targeted full and fair employment to stop people from drifting to more extremist ideologies because everyone literally just lived through the result of highly unregulated capitalism for example. That was a large impetus behind Keynesianism and Bretton Woods, which was ultimately unsustainable and led to the broader global economy we have now- which itself seems more unsustainable by the day.

> So productivity has increased, but you get a glossy new shiny report in a PDF, instead of a photocopy of a typewritten page.

"Now, you can typeset everything in your office" - early Macintosh ad.

No offense but jobs changing is a very different shift than jobs being entirely replaced by automation.

One can adapt to needing to learn new technology, but one cannot adapt to an algorithm out performing you

The parent commenter is saying that the moment automation entirely replaced traditional typesetting, people moved on and started using the new technology.

Sure a part of the population is slow to adapt and therefore at a disadvantage. But the others, like his wife, adapted.

The idea is that this wave of automation will be no different than other times this has happened to us in the past.

The difference could be that A(G)I will automate away the would-have-been new jobs as well, instantly, as it will function as a smarter human that needs no sleep and demands no pay, sort of like a young programmer but without capital owners even having to supply caffeinated beverages.

A lot of decisions are not based on intelligence alone. A lot is about personal beliefs and tastes.

I've never totally understood this binary moment when AGI does "everything" better. How can one even define everything?

Our AI partner could be the most intelligent mathematician or researcher. That's great then we can bounce ideas off of them and they can help us realize our professional / creative ambitions.

Sure if our goal is to maximize profit then maybe we can outsource the decisions to an AI agent.

You can get a computer to create infinite remixes of songs. I haven't seen that replacing music producers doing the same.

> A lot of decisions are not based on intelligence alone. A lot is about personal beliefs and tastes.

That's the easy stuff! That's the stuff ML has been successful doing for a decade or more.

The I in AGI doesn't really mean intelligence as in "a mathematician has to be more intelligent than a janitor to do his job" *, it means the productivity equivalent of whatever human conciousness is; that is, to be able to have beliefs and tastes as well. And since it will have infinite patience, arguments such as "I prefer to have an actual human musician playing" is also up for persuasion.

When everyone can just press a button and have better music automatically generated, based on their exact preferences inferred from their DNA or an fMRI brain scan, what are your creative ambitions?

I'm obviously not talking about today's limited (public) AI, but far into the future, like in 5 years.

* whether or not that is actually the case is irrelevant

The music analogy doesn't work for me at all.

So much about music appreciation is about knowing the artist and for example knowing that what they sing about is shaped by their personal history allowing you to identify with it.

A lot about the appreciation of art is the process and the intention behind the artwork. The final image or sond is just one part.

I find it very difficult to define "better" when we're talking about art.

  needs to replace a significant part of the infrastructure and processes to achieve a long term sustainable society

AI infra is extremely energy intensive and not sustainable by any metric.

That sounds like a myth to me. An Nvidia H100 consumes up to 700 watts. The same as hair dryers and microwave ovens.

Sure you have big data centers full of them but that's already happening with other hardware in other businesses too.

(Humans are ~200W, as context)

Your assumptions are incorrect.

Please do provide some source

what opportunities do you see in food production? i’d love to get involved

Our food supply system is broken.

- It emits 30% of climate emissions

- 30% of food produced is gone in losses and waste

- People in middle to high income countries have significant obesity and related problems (some countries have either malnourished people or obese people, and less in between)

- Pollution from our agriculture and aquaculture is killing the ocean near land

- Our intensive agriculture is threatening biodiversity

- We have lost up to 70% of insects in many industrial nations

- Essentially all (90%?) of ocean fish stocks are overfished or at capacity. Even a supposedly rational and environmentally aware nation like Sweden can stop the overfishing. The cod stock has collapsed and now the herring is going too

- The soils are being destroyed or depleted

- The phosphor and nitrogen cycle is broken (fossil fuels or resources that are mismanaged)

I could go on. It is well documented.

I work on circular food production, where we really care about putting together highly efficient nutrient loops and make sure they work locally/regionally. A mix of tech (automation, IT, climate control, etc), agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, insects etc. As part of this there are very interesting completing pieces with ways of getting the nutrients in creative ways (new food tech), dealing with animal disease (new tech), combined with sensors, ML and just plain old common sense, that can make a huge impact. If we just think through the process a bit more and take responsibility for the externalities, which really are starting to bite.

Much is still overhyped in foodtech imho, specifically the stuff which claims silver bullets without proper circularity. Which is detrimental to the real solutions as investors like simple superscalable solutions, and the simple solutions are mostly not sustainable. (There are of course exceptions).

Get outside, go hiking, climb a mountain! That’s my big offline plan for this year and I’m excited to do it.

The world is way bigger than technology and the Internet. It hasn’t really gone anywhere

That isn't the OP's point I believe. I think the point was if the more productive means of production is ultra-centralized to a few owners of AI, the question wouldn't be whether to go outside, but whether you can afford to not be permanently outside, if the superstructure of society assigns housing to capital and not humans.

> if the more productive means of production is ultra-centralized to a few owners of AI

But AI is different than previous waves, like search engines and social networks. You can download a model on a stick. You can run it on a CPU or GPU, even a phone. These models are easy to work with, directly in natural language, easy to fine-tune, faster, cheaper, and private under your control. AI is a decentralizing technology, will empower everyone directly, it's like open source and Linux in that it puts users in control.

Since this is just knowledge, I don't think it can be guarded all that well.

Anyone can make a cotton gin.. Industrialization of an industry basically centralizes its profits on a relatively small number of winners who have some advantage of lead time on some important factors as it becomes not worthwhile for the vast majority of participants from when it required more of the population.

> Chips are made from sand.

And that sand takes a very, very long time with lots of big brains to figure out how to manipulate at the nanometer level in order to give you a "beep boop"

It's not like Intel could decide tomorrow to spin up a fab and immediately make NVIDIA and TSMC irrelevant. They're the next closest thing given they make chips, have GPU technology, and also foundry experience and it's still multiple years of effort if they chose that direction.

Your statement is a lot like saying "poker has predictable odds" and yet there is still a vast ocean of poker players.

Yea, I deleted that second sentence that you quoted, since it is opening up another discussion that was kind of orthogonal to my main point.

If knowledge alone were sufficient, foundational models would be ubiquitous.

They're becoming ubiquitous last time I checked. LLMs are almost commoditized.

One can't really enjoy life much if you don't have financial means to survive. This technology promises to wipe of hundred's of thousands of jobs in media production - from videographers, actors, animators, designers, camera person working in TV, Movie production all are one click away from losing job.

Most of those jobs only existed for about two generations of human history. Who knows what future jobs will exist.

The killer product of 2030 - the standalone TV that generates its own content.

do people even want that?

i thought the point of tv was to sit back and be entertained, usually through some form of storytelling. personally, i don't want to have any part in the creation. if anything custom content would be annoying, because i'd lose the only social aspect of tv (discussing with others)

I'm sure the AI itself or some social media prompt sharing service can generate the narrative.

The viewers dad is the hero in all movies using his real world skills. In the end he finds mum.

I can't believe we can actually create Rick and Morty's Interdimensional Cable

I think it will be much sooner than that. And the TV is already in your pocket.

good startup idea !

Good idea. But for people like me, reading a book on a technical subject feels like climbing a mountain — but even more thrilling and enriching!

Fresh air and sunlight are important though.

You can read any book outside.

You can read books outside.

Best place to. Especially with a cup of tea.

caveat - it kind of is going somewhere, the amount of wilderness has gone from like 65% to 35% in the last 50 years

on the flip side, we'll just generate VR wilderness in the near future and nobody will care what's real or not

"I’ve just accepted that I’m going to feel less and less useful as time goes by"

It's probably the same feeling farmers had in the beginning of the 20th century when they started seeing industrialized farming technologies (tractors, etc). Sure, farming tech eliminated tons of farming jobs, but they have been replaced by other types of jobs in the cities.

It's the same thing with AI. Some will lose their jobs, but only to find different types of jobs that AI can't do.

Sorry, but comparing this to previous technology seems totally short-sighted to me (and it’s not as though you’re the first to do so). If (if) we end up with truly general AI (and at the moment we seem to be close in some ways and still very far off in others), then that will be fundamentally different from any technology that has come before.

> jobs that AI can't do.

Sure, by definition, you’ve described the set of jobs that won’t be replaced by AI. But naming a few would be a lot more useful of a comment. It’s not impossible to imagine that that set might shrink to being pretty much empty within the next ten years.

> It’s not impossible to imagine that that set might shrink to being pretty much empty within the next ten years.

No but it’s also not impossible to imagine the opposite. AI beat humans at chess decades ago but there are more humans generating income from chess today than there were before Deep Blue.

No one pays anyone to play chess because it’s useful.

Chess players get paid because it’s entertaining for others to watch.

So your argument only shows that we can expect work as a form of entertainment to survive. Outside of YouTube, where programmers and musicians and such can make a living by streaming their work live, this is a minuscule minority.

The strongest interpretation of what you’re saying seems to be that we’ll end up in a world where everything (science, engineering, writing, design) is a sport and none of it really matters because ultimately it’s ‘just a game’. Maybe so… but is that really something to look forward to?

They get paid because the people who can't play chess professionally watch it as a mental escape from their drudgery jobs because it reminds them of their youth when they could still dream about becoming a great chess player, and then you can use marketing displayed during the chess tournament to trick them into preferring to spend the money they make from the drudgery on the adveritser's product.

Now upgrade AI to do every job better than humans so that there are no drudgery jobs. What money are they going to spend?

Not too long ago, people would come and visit the first family in the village who had installed running water, because it was a new and exciting thing to see. And yet people don't wake up every day excited to see water coming from their kitchen tap.

Think more broadly than that single example. Perhaps humans will always be interested in economic activity that involves interacting with other humans, regardless of what the robots can do.

I agree but also think this discussion need to go deeper into its assumptions. They can't really hold in a world with AGI. Can anyone acquire/own AGI? Why? Why not? Will anyone pay anyone for anything? Will capital, material and real estate be the only things with steep price tags? What would a computer cost if all work was done by AI?

My intuition tells me humans will always have needs that AI can't fulfill. If AI does more and more jobs, cheaper, faster, and better than humans, then the price of these services and goods are going to drop, and that means people will have more disposable income to spend on other services and goods that are more expensive because AI can't produce those (yet).

Imagine a breakthrough not only in AI but also robotics, allowing restaurants to replace the entire staff (chefs, cooks, waiters, etc) with AI-powered robots. Then I believe that higher-end restaurants will STILL be employing humans, as it will be perceived as more expensive, more sophisticated, therefore worth a premium price. What if robot cooks cook better and faster than human cooks? Then higher-end restaurants will probably have human cooks supervising robot cooks to correct their occasional errors, thereby still providing a service superior to cheaper restaurants using robot cooks only.

>It's probably the same feeling farmers had in the beginning of the 20th century

Not remotely comparable. Farming is a backbreaking job, many were happy to see it going away. This is taking over the creative functions. Turns out what Humanity is best at, is menial labor?

Well, replacing novel creative functions with derivative creative functions. That's the big change I see here; similar to the difference between digitally editing an image vs. applying a stock sepia filter to it. Yes, we can use a model to regurgitate a mish mash of the data it was trained on, and that regurgitation might be novel in that nothing like that has been regurgitated before, but it will still be a regurgitation of pre-existing art. To some degree humans do this too, but the constraints are infinitely different.

Humanity will not be best at anything. Even menial labor will be automated.

So the downside is we have lives devoid of meaning. The upside is we live in a scarcity free paradise where all diseases have been cured by superhuman ai and we can all live doing whatever we want.

Eventually, but economics points into a couple of a decades of menial labour first since humans will be so cheap.

Anyhow, what makes you think the AI or whomever controls it has any use for a bunch of useless eaters?

> but they have been replaced by other types of jobs in the cities.

But when one is 30+ years old, or even 40+ years old, it's hard to completely switch careers, especially when you're also dealing with the fact that it's not because you were bad at your job. Rather, a machine was made to replace you and you simply can't compete with a machine.

It's evolution, of course, but it is a stressful process.

Even if one is able to switch careers in their 40s and 50s, it is sad that they’re forced to do so, just to eat and have a roof over their head.

Nearly all humans work for money (aka, just basic stuff) and not because they’re passionate about their work. It is just a sad situation all around

I see this "just adapt" response a lot and it misses the point. The goal of research like this is to create a machine that can do any job better than humans.

And when that happens, humans will no longer need jobs.

The problem is the transition into that new world.

That's been the prediction with many technological updates, but here we are. This setup works just fine for the small group of fantastically wealthy and powerful people that dictate society's requirements for the rest of us.

I can't imagine anything changing our culture's insistence that personal responsibility in employment means zero responsibility for employers, policy makers, or society at large. That is, short of a large scale armed rebellion, or maybe mass unionization.

> short of a large scale armed rebellion, or maybe mass unionization

don't worry; AI drones will deal efficiently with both those forms of terrorism and malinformation

With all of the great AI-driven public opinion influencing tools? I can't imagine they'd need to TBH. To be clear, I think the likelihood of an armed rebellion is zero, and a successful one would be less than zero. While mass unionization may be more likely, as soon as it starts to significantly impact the top's bottom line across the board, we'd see a bunch of laws that cripple unions.

The other problem is that the powers that be won't need the masses for anything.

World War 3 is planned to take care of that.

Sounds messy. Simply tanking the birth rate will do?

COVID-25

They will not need jobs because AI corporations will give them everything they need just like that?

History is full of examples of people with power deciding that they like resources but don't need the people who live on top of them, and solving this problem by going on a killing spree.

Bear in mind that a substantial portion of people (perhaps 30%) don't feel satisfied unless they see someone else worse off. We are not an inherently egalitarian species.

"People" find different jobs but individuals don't. Many people displaced by technology don't recover even despite retraining programs and go work in service industry or go into early retirement. The new jobs go to a younger generation.

I feel this, thank you.

I've started reading again, because reddit/instagram/etc. has become kind of boring for me? Like, I still go on them to get an instant dopamine hit from time to time, but like you said burying yourself in a textbook just feels so much more rewarding.

I've abandoned all online content sources except HN, Substack, and YouTube. The latter two are aggressively filtered and still feel like they're getting less interesting over time. HN isn't the best habit, either, but it's good to have at least one source of news.

Hah, I feel the same. HN has good news, but the community is hit or miss.

what substacks and youtube do you follow? email in bio

Maybe someone needs to start a small group of people who specifically want to do this — seek refuge from the chaotic and increasingly worrying world (in particular the threat of replacement by extremely general automated systems) by immersing themselves in learning, and sharing the results with others.

I’m sure such groups already exist, but maybe not specifically with this goal in mind.

Learning for its own sake really is the answer to lasting happiness… for some of us, anyway.

> seek refuge from the chaotic and increasingly worrying world (in particular the threat of replacement by extremely general automated systems) by immersing themselves in learning, and sharing the results with others.

Since 529 CE!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedictines

I skimmed the article and couldn’t see which part was particularly relevant. Can you point out the similarity?

If you’re just talking about the idea of becoming a monk: yes, I very much like the idea of becoming a modern, digitally-enabled monk.

I think his point is that people have felt like the world is going to shit for a very long time, it's just that with the presence of hindsight we can see that in the past everything worked out, but we can't see the future so our present is troubling.

But none of these feelings are new, just different problems manifesting the same.

I've got about a million things I'd like to delve into if such a group existed(let's call it a realist monastery?)

The key though is to avoid becoming a cult.

Cults presumably need leaders, and there wouldn’t be one. It would be kind of like a church though. But we worship pure knowledge and learning.

In any group there are people that are more talented, more persuasive and/or have more initiative than others. These people will naturally become the group's leaders. This can only be avoided in groups which don't have to make on decisions or conduct activities.

We could call it...a university.

Sure but since we know everything we know will be wrong in 500-1000 years we might as well register it as a church complete with creation myths. :)

Hey, Euclid's ideas from 2000+ years ago are still going strong.

I doubt much of what we know today will turn out to be wrong. Maybe our abstractions will turn out to have been naive or suboptimal, but at least they're demonstrably predictive. They're not just quackery or mysticism.

Things dont have to be wrong to be considered wrong :)

Well… in subjects like mathematics they kind of do, don’t they? There’s not much room for opinion on what’s true and what isn’t. Of course, how something is done or the language used to describe it is always up for debate.

You did say ‘wrong’, though, not ‘considered wrong’.

There are no negatieve quanta and there are no negatieve qualities. It would be hilarious to suggest there would be products of the two.

You have 3 baskets with 5 apples each, you remove 7 apples from each basket, remove 5 baskets and you have -2 baskets with -2 apples each thus therefore you have 4 apples left all without the involvement of trees, like Jezus!

Yeah, i can see people laugh at that.

I knew someone would say this. Have a think about whether universities really achieve what I’m describing.

It's kinda like how church attendees aren't always upstanding moral individuals.

Not really. Universities barely even pretend to be ‘churches of learning’ — at least anymore. Going to university, for the vast majority of students these days, is more an exercise in CV-building than self-development and learning.

Such groups are by definition reclusive, hard to find on social media, and might be a lot more fringe or "weird" than you'd prefer. For a while, subreddits were a bit like this.

I don't think it's too far fetched to hypothesize that the next major global conflict will be between accelerators (e/acc) and decelerators. I see a parallel with political/economic ideologies like capitalism and communism. One of them will eventually prevail (for most of the world) but it won't be clear which until it happens. Scary but also exciting times ahead!

I can't imagine any coherent 'deceleratorionist' political program. It will be all different flavors of acc.

Is this a joke? Go outside. Go hiking. Make a garden. Visit Yosemite. Take up bouldering. Learn to surf. Cycle. Go camping. There's a world of living and massive communities but around real life. Explore what your body and mind can do together. Find kinship because it's out there in spades for people not obsessed with the automation of machined content.

San Francisco, Zurich, etc are quite different from other places in the world.

No mountains here + no garden for me, Yosemite is thousands of kilometers away. The sea has no waves. It's -5 degrees.

Which is "fine", but it means that indoor activities are more prevalent, including computers.

And I'm sure for some other people their options are way more restricted.

What about it makes you think I’m joking?

> Life will probably never be as good as it was for people 30 years older than me

> Nothing about the future looks particularly good, other than that medicine is improving.

How do you reconcile your thoughts with what the CEOs of these AI companies keep telling us? I.e. "the present is the most amazing time to be alive", and "the future will be unimaginably better". I'm paraphrasing, but it's the gist of what Sam Altman recently said at the World Government Summit[1].

Are these people visionaries of some idealistic future that these technologies will bring us, or are they blinded by their own greed and power and driving humanity towards a future they can control? Something else?

FWIW I share your thoughts and feelings, but at the same time have a pinch of cautious optimism that things might indeed be better overall. Sure, bad actors that use technology for malicious purposes will continue to exist, but there is potential for this technology to open new advancements in all areas of science, which could improve all our lives in ways we can't imagine yet.

I guess I'm more excited about the possibilities and seeing how all this unfolds than pessimistic, although that is still a strong feeling.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15UZCAr3shU

> How do you reconcile your thoughts with what the CEOs of these AI companies keep telling us? I.e. "the present is the most amazing time to be alive", and "the future will be unimaginably better". I'm paraphrasing, but it's the gist of what Sam Altman recently said at the World Government Summit[1].

Three ways:

* It's the job of CEOs to advocate the benefits of what they're doing.

* Those things might be true, for them.

* Those things might be true, from a global perspective, even if there are some people who are worse off. White-collar workers might just be those people worse off.

> How do you reconcile your thoughts with what the CEOs of these AI companies keep telling us?

It gives me some hope, which fades rapidly as soon as I remember the vested interests such people have.

If you think that's bad, try being 18 :) this field may not exist (at least in its present form) by the time I'm out of uni (I'm planning to hedge my bets by studying physics), and it seems the world is getting less stable by the minute. There seems to be no sense of urgency or even medium-term thinking in stopping Putin, and Article 5 appears to be becoming less sacrosanct by the minute. Society is increasingly divided, with absolutely no attempt to find common ground (particularly evident in my demographic) and the majority of my generation having a miniscule (and shrinking) attention span through their direct stream of Chinese propaganda. And, of course, the climate-shaped elephant in the room.

I'm just trying to not let it get in the way of appreciating the world. I'm planning to travel to mainland Europe sometime next year (gap year). SpaceX has reignited spaceflight, and there's so much cool stuff going on in that space. Science marches on, with a steady stream of interesting discoveries.

And programming is great - for now. It feels slightly strange spending a week writing a project that may be finished with a single prompt in a few year's time, but it's enjoyable.

Maybe I'm overreacting? I've grown up in a pretty calm period, with the west in a clearly dominant position. Maybe this is, paradoxically, a return to normality?

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

So true. Even if it's not AI, climate change, or WW3 may doom us very soon. Just chill and enjoy life while we can.

> I’ve just accepted that I’m going to feel less and less useful as time goes by

You are not alone : https://youtu.be/h3-va0umXTY?t=383

PS: youtube.com at 6:23, "Leonardo DiCaprio,,Julia Butters in Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood --break"

I’m the complete opposite, I wish I was being born 20 years in future. I am kinda terrified of being 80 when they come out with some technique for heavily slowing down aging and our generation just has to sigh and accept we just missed the cutoff.

I don't necessarily wish I'd been born earlier (I probably don't, if I think about it). I just think it might have been more fun.

Same, I feel nothing.

Just another tool.

Until full automated agent that is able to carry out a task from start to finish without human intervention, there is something for us to do I guess.

This is an exciting future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg

>medicine is improving.

I doubt whether this is true. Lots of hype, but no tangible improvement to show for chronic conditions for common people.

I'll just say: I have Type 1 diabetes, and in my lifetime, we have invented

- fast acting analog insulins that are metabolized in 2-3 hours instead of 6-7

- insulin pumps that automatically dose exactly the right proportion of insulin

- continuous glucose monitoring system that lets you see your BG update in real time (before, it was finger sticks 4-5 times a day; before that, urine test strips where you pee on a stick to get a 6 hours delayed reading (!))

- automated dosing algorithms that can automatically correct BG to bring it into range

In aggregate, these amount to what is closer than not to a functional cure for type 1 diabetes. 100 years ago, this was a fatal condition.

You are partially correct. Although notice that diabetes, both type I and II have dramatically increased due to a direct result of bad advice and environment. A little like giving a deaf person a hearing aid, while not addressing factors like loud noises that may lead to hearing loss.

GLP-1 isn't a tangible improvement for a chronic condition for common people?

Medical understanding is not getting worse, unless I’m severely mistaken.

The systems that deliver the medical care might be, however (and indeed observably locally are, in many cases).

>Medical understanding is not getting worse, unless I’m severely mistaken.

You are mistaken. To realize that you will have to look back several decades and read the literature of those times, of what is left. Now note I'm taking about chronic illnesses (diabetes, cancer etc) not acute ones like an infection etc. The medical practitioner of yesteryear did not have the fancy diagnostic tools that we have today, but several of them appear to me to be sharp observers.

You're exactly right, but most people just believe the headlines about cancer cures and "individualized medicine" that pop up every week and don't realize that literally none of them produce anything that helps real life patients. Medicine is not getting better - it's getting more expensive and less efficient.

> literally none of them produce anything that helps real life patients

If you make claims that bold no one should even bother to read on.

I dunno, I can casually get an MRI to check the status of slime in my nose these days. It may not be strictly ‘better’ but the availability certainly goes up.

A majority of what you wrote is objectively false FUD. The only thing that I found accurate is: > it's getting more expensive and less efficient There have been a ridiculous number of medical advances in the last few years, advances that are actively improving and saving lives as I write this. Remember that time we had a pandemic, and quickly designed and produced a massive number of vaccines? Saved millions of lives, kept hundreds of millions from being bed ridden for weeks? The medical technology to design those vaccines, and to produce them at that speed and scale didn't exist 20 years ago. Cancer treatments, which you specifically mentioned, are entirely better than they were 10 years ago.

The actual issue, which is the only worthwhile thing you wrote about, is cost and availability.

You are simply ignoring what I actually said. My criticism was directed at specific fields: name one cancer treatment or "individualized medicine" approach that has been proven to save lives or increase quality of life in the last 3-5 years. I'll wait.

The vaccines were not the result of medicine getting "better" - they just happened to have a solution for the right thing at the right time, which is fortunate (and we're lucky that it worked, because there was no guarantee of that beforehand) but if the pandemic hadn't happened, what advances would we be discussing? What advances are actually making medicine better aside from once-in-a-hundred-year worldwide emergencies?

Cancer cure, is indeed a big can of worms. I commented on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39084422

Cheer up. It's not real. Generative AI is going to force us to confront what makes us human and the real world real, and learn to love it all over again. Sure, a lot of people will be lost in digital realms. Some might even like it. But I think that many will embrace the messy, imperfect, poignant realm we live in.

Good perspective. Thank you.