1131
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
1131 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
87515 readers
2766 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
I can't vouch for that other person's anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.
AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.
An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you're curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.
Funny how my experience is the American health care system is still 100% absolute shit that costs me 2k a month for the privilege of said shit. My wait times are the same, my "go fuck yourselves" are the same, my healthcare workers are still underpaid, and the systems for consumers are still shit.
"But the charts say AI is helping"
Once again it's consumers get to wait for the piss to trickle down our backs. AI hasn't done shit for the average Joe except make everything cost more while providing a worse service. Please, tell me how my healthcare experience has improved in the past 2 years. Go.
You are talking about a different thing than I am. The American healthcare system is garbage with or without AI, but AI is helping the medical field. Getting a more accurate analysis of an MRI scan is objectively a good thing, for example, even if the healthcare system that performed the scan is garbage.
How is "helping the medical field" not compatible with better healthcare quality? If the end user isn't experiencing benefits, then how can you claim that benefits have been provided? Who is getting these "benefits" if it's not the end user? If someone IS getting benefits, yet the end users still haven't gotten a better experience... Then can you agree that AI is only helping intermediaries? Like... The corporations who provide the garbage experience?
Do you see your logical fallacy here?
If your loved one is diagnosed with cancer early that would have been missed by a human, that's a fucking benefit, is it not?
I'm sick of luddites.
But is that happening? Have we seen better diagnoses? Can you reference a study showing that we are actually catching more cancer?
Or are you just feeding into the bullshit of "AI IS CHANGING EVERYTHING" because that's what they tell you?
I'm sick of people like you claiming benefits from a technology that is literally raping us all. Our checkbooks, our jobs, our environments, our freedoms, our communities. "But but someone told me it's helping" fuck off prove it.
You're sick of luddites? I'm sick of being lied to, and sick of saps like you spreading the lies.