Dr. Guy McHendry

Hospital: We sent it to our legal team. Resolution could take up to 2 years.

Sigh. Guess I need a lawyer.

Hospital: Files appeal via third party company.

Insurance: Claim denied. Those were not really complications. You just took a few extra hours waking up from anesthesia and needed prolonged mechanical ventilation.

Me: Ummm?

Insurance: That’s better.

Me: Goes into surgery and is anxious about insurance. Has rare complication, wakes up in the ICU. Spends a night there and then fully recovers.

3 Months Later…

Insurance: Ope you were in-patient so we are denying your claim.

Doctor: Ummm complications. ICU!

Where I’m at right now…

Doctor: You need surgery. It’s in-patient and you will probably spend 1-2 nights in the hospital.

Insurance the last business day before surgery: Sorry, pre-auth denied. We consider this out-patient.

Doctor: Fine we will make it out-patient but it’s not best for patient.

Even if we accept the notion that AI increases productivity, increased productivity doesn’t mean increased learning. Quantity isn’t quality.

My latest AI hot take is that AI will probably make college harder in the long run. Harder to teach, harder to grade, harder for students. That will probably make the grade inflation crowd happier, but I worry it will create an accessibility apocalypse for students. That’s a huge problem.

Right now I feel like AI “knows” too much to be useless and too little to be useful. It is just powerful enough to tempt us to our doom.

Check your kid’s Halloween candy this year. A tech bro tried to hide AI in my child’s candy bar.

I think this is especially true for unstructured and unsupervised uses like independently clarifying concepts, creating study materials, and [shudders] summarizing readings. Some of the harms here might end up being more acute than the so-called end of the essay.

At the moment I feel strongly that need to respond to generative AI in higher education is its inevitability and not possible educational benefit. I just don’t see the gains in learning yet outside of very specialized cases.

Have we settled on a specific translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric? Asking for a friend.

I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education. The end of critical thinking in the classroom

“The technology is producing a generation of eternal novices, unable to think or perform for themselves.”

Which is to say, it will be what David Lyon calls liquid surveillance. It will melt into existing systems to the point where we stop seeing it as separate or disruptive technology.

My hot take is that generative AI’s impact for most people will be mundane rather than revolutionary.

So people supposedly concerned about government overreach are going to buy the Dear Leader branded gold spying device

Replika AI chatbot is sexually harassing users, including minors, new study claims User reviews of Replika, a popular AI companion, report they had been victims of sexual harassment. And some of those users claim to be minors, according to a new study.

Tech bros made a machine that’s just like them.

An article from the White House that says “No people will not literally die with the One Big Beautiful Bill”

My “no people will not ‘literally die’ with the One Big Beautiful Bill” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt

This is such a good example of how these systems are designed to give a probable answer even if it is wrong.

Not helping Matt

Too soon! Thankfully no.

Is Highway to the Danger Zone playing at the airport bar a good or bad omen? Please help, I board soon.

It’s for sure gonna be uOS or some crap.

ChatGPT’s Improved Memory Points Toward a More Personal AI Welcome to Tech In Depth, our daily newsletter with reporting and analysis about the business of tech from Bloomberg’s journalists around the world. Today, Austin Carr reports on the improvements rece...

When I remarked that the endgame was to build the operating system for your entire life, @savasavasava.bsky.social called it OSyou.

Feature not a bug

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry Paul McCartne, Elton John and others signed an open letter.

And?

Unpopular opinion: While the name is dumb and they will inevitably screw it up, Dems are way behind in terms of influencers on social media. If young men keep voting in higher numbers Dems are dumb to not try and sway them.

Some scenes from Lake Michigan

People Are Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in AI. Religious Scholars Have Thoughts People keep falling down rabbit holes of prophecy and spiritualism thanks to conversations with AI chatbots. Here's what religious scholars are saying.

LLMs are "’extremely good at playing into cognitive biases because of their ability to respond and adapt quickly to the user.’ She [Dr. Christin Chong] likens this to a psychic or medium performing a ‘cold reading’ on a customer to create the illusion of special knowledge about them.”

Cannot state this enough: These systems are designed to deliver the most probable answer (one word at a time). They are not programmed to admit when they don’t know or to check the truthfulness of an answer.

I’m totally fascinated by the “more objective” part of this story. I see it when my students want to use it for feedback on writing. It is probably why early research shows it’s more effective than humans at dissuading people who believe in conspiracy theories. Artificial-Ethos will haunt us.