The analyst is stuck in the past. Genomic solutions are personalized medicine. As long as there are new people, and new combinations of genes, there will be problems to solve.
But imagine all the data, tech and data center companies simultaneously go into receivership. Farfetched, but indulge the fantasy.
At that moment what choice would the government have but to conduct a rescue that at least keeps the lights on, and probably more? What’s the alternative? Extensive data losses, business interruptions— if just a couple of those key companies spontaneously stopped operating, chaos.
If the companies run cash flow positive absent debt service (I assume this is the case), the creditors will be in charge, they can put up more $, or get a loan while they re-structure the company. Either they end up owning it, or they sell it. This can happen to a bunch of companies at the same time.
There would not really be a huge rush if they are cashflow positive, they can take their time.
If Donald Trump used this OpenAI product to-- who knows-- brainstorm Truth Social content, and his chats were produced to the NYT as well as its consultants and lawyers, who would believe Mr. Trump's content remained secure, confidential and protected from misuse against his wishes?
That's simply a function of the fact it's a controversial news organization running a dragnet on private communications to a technology platform.
My guess: they vibe-coded the integrations between the new and old M365 components. Baffling lack of cross-component integration, all apparent only when you actually try to use it as intended.
Not quibbling, but preservation and production of these records has really minimal connection to the public purpose behind sunshine laws. It reveals the fact of suspicionless mass surveillance, but the monitoring is not of or about government functions. Clearly the drafters of a law were not imaginative enough to foresee the dystopian turn government has taken, but let’s face it: if someone put that surveillance camera in the courthouse, which is more connected to public sunshine, the analysis might have gone differently.
Sounds more like an argument against the cameras at all, which in turn is an argument for keeping the footage public; as hard as it is to get most people to care about surveillance, hiding the recordings would only make it harder. Any remote possibility of something like this eventually is going to start with people being uncomfortable with it, and that's not going to happen if we aren't forced to confront the full implications of it.
Plus, there's the usual concerns of how easy it is to craft narratives by showing only bits and pieces of what happened. If law enforcement is going to be using this footage as evidence for arrests, it's definitely better that that people can have their lawyers review the public record for footage that might paint things in a different light. Sure, prosecutors should theoretically be required to share potentially exculpatory evidence with the defense, but there's no shortage of known instances where that didn't happen, and the system should not be set to to make the availability of information even more unbalanced than it already is
The website security model breaks down when people constantly try to enter your password.
The currently model assumes good behavior by most people most of the time in order for basic web services to function. Seems like an obvious vulnerability to malicious activity.
There is no way for them to even remotely verify if you are "without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional" in the room, so to a rebellious outlaw, these prohibitions might as well not exist.
GPT saved me yesterday. It helped me identify and verify a rare three-way undocumented medicine interaction that was causing anguish. The interaction was hypomagnesia and serious arrhythmia caused by a combination of berberine, famotidine, and vonoprazan. This was despite magnesium supplementation.
Two months ago it helped me accurately identify a gastrointestinal diverticulitis-type issue, find the right medication for it (metronidazole), which fixed the issue for good. It also guided me on identifying the cause, and also on pausing and restoring fiber intake appropriately.
Granted, it is very easy for people to make serious mistakes in using LLMs, but granted how many mistakes doctors make, it is better to take some self-responsibility first. The road to making a useful diagnosis can be windy, but with sufficient exploration, GPT will get you there.
The bad idea is to live and die in ignorance. The good idea is to use GPT to find ideas and references that one can then verify. If it were up to the medical establishment, they would block the public from accessing medical research altogether, and they already do this by paywalling much research.
We see with trains and jets that the public does not accept deaths with the same benign resignation as automobiles.
The question is: will turning all the cars into a collective Borg operated by Big Tech upend our indifference to auto fatalities?
Already we see that all the latest catastrophes from self-driving cars make much better press, so no, society will not give Waymo a “pass” for just killing a few people through a corporate cost-benefit analysis, particularly when those people never accepted the risk of dealing with Waymo in the first place. And you can substitute the name of any other car company there.
This is basically the opposite of how juror psychology works. Jurors in these cases tend to vote against defendants they identify with because they prefer to believe they’d never act like the defendant. Source: I’m a former jury consultant who researched and consulted on these kinds of cases.
there's more than a hundred people on those vehicles though.
also I'm sure a lot of the safety is driven in part by customer demand - people would quickly stop buying airplane tickets if airplanes were crashing regularly.
if robotaxis were also crashing regularly people would stop using them at all.
The question wasn't about "corporate cost-benefit analysis", it was simply (and vaguely) will society accepts deaths caused by robots, and the answer simply admitted the reality that no technology is perfect.
Trains and airplanes are fundamentally different from cars. A car accident is unlikely to kill you. A plane crash will. A car accident is unlikely to kill your entire family. A plane crash will.
The standard is higher for these modes of transportation because the consequences of individual incidents are higher. People innately recognize this; we only have one life; one family.
A train or airplane is much less likely to kill me than a car. Just if there is an accident those two modes are more likely to kill, but they are massively much less likely to be in an accident in the first place.
Auto fatalities are insane, and the US focus on build highways at all costs while out of the other side of their mouth parroting talking points about safety is one of the uniquely stupid things we do as a society. The safest car is the one parked in your garage. The safest driver is the one who isn't behind the wheel.
That being said, I think Waymo is spot-on here. The US at least will accept deaths due to these machines - look at how we accept car deaths now - but the problem Waymo faces is that when these machines do kill someone it's not like automobile insurance today but instead it's a lawsuit every single time until/unless we construct a new regulatory framework to divest corporations from having real responsibility for the deaths caused by these machines. We shouldn't fight the technology, IMO, because I think over the long term it will be safer to be in an autonomous car. We should instead ensure that if such deaths occur, businesses don't get to step away from their responsibility and have to pay rather large sums.
All that being said, all of the above is a complete waste of time and civilizational level resources. Most people should be walking, biking, and hopping on an automated rail line to get around. It's cheaper, healthier, and better in every way. And then when you want to take the car for that road trip or Sunday drive you still can.
That's pretty sad. That means the real question society wants answered before letting these things on the road is not how to avoid deaths, but who pays and how much when deaths aren't avoided.
That, unfortunately, is the reality. There are in the US probably 0 departments of transportation/highways including at the federal level that are focused on reducing car crashes and deaths. The only true focus is expansion of highways to ease congestion.
Why is that?
The staff and engineers at these organizations and all of the contracting companies make a lot of money building additive solutions to existing problems. They can’t build a rail line or a tram line because then they won’t have a job. Sidewalks crumble not because of a lack of funding, but because there is more money to be made widening a highway.
The US Department of Transportation includes minimizing traffic deaths in their planning by assigning a cost of $13.7M as the "Valuation of a Statistical Life":
Sure, but you know that number and how it's treated is bullshit. Want to know why?
In Ohio in 2024 there were around 1,200 fatalities due to car crashes.
The Ohio Department of Transportation's budget is around $11 billion.
Multiple 1,200 by $13,700,000.00 and let me know what number you get. That's just Ohio.
None of these departments operate in any way other than to build and expand highways. If they actually had to be accountable for the number of deaths, they'd do the opposite. They would be tearing down highways and implementing safer and more cost effective alternatives.
If the value of the lives lost in just one state due to car crashes is $5 billion more than the entire budget of the transportation agency, why doesn't the transportation agency take specific actions to get more drivers off the road where they can't be killed? Why does it instead take actions to increase the number of drivers?
And we're just talking about deaths, not even other repercussions or cost including traffic degradation due to accidents.
If we were to take any of these numbers at face value, you're telling me my own state loses out on $16,440,000,000.00 of human lives on an annual basis and we're not doing anything about it but we're spending $11,000,000,000.00 to make the problem worse. Now multiply that across the entire country.
Since we're speaking in generalities here, I can tell you that generally things like crash cost, time delay like when we just had two semi trailers crash and shut down an entire critical interstate, etc. aren't taken into account.
If you wanted to include some of those factors, including travel time and travel time cost, etc. you'd be even more disappointed in the performance of your state and local governments with respect to transportation both in how we move people and money.
And that's just direct costs, we can also start looking at other societal costs, whether that's pollution due to exhaust fumes, the destruction of small businesses, obesity, etc.
Going back to the article though for a second, the CEO of Waymo (or whoever it was) was exactly correct. Society will tolerate these deaths. We tolerate them and their costs en masse today. It's just a matter for Waymo and whoever to figure out liability for crashes and make sure that it doesn't fall on them and that society instead bears that cost like we do for highway crashes and death, etc.
The dispatcher is just there to send police to a call. I doubt any dispatcher is going to put their ass on the line when deciding whether or not a caller (AI or human) is credible or not when a gun is involved. Send the cops and let them figure it out. Plus it's not like they are an expert at identifying a gun from CCTV images. What if it was a gun and the dispatcher made the decision not to send cops? That kind of decision really isn't theirs to make.
Dispatch is quite complicated. They are always operating with limited time and imperfect information. Their job is to send help. As for the attending officers, they are supposed to know that dispatch has imperfect information.
There should be a higher bar for determining gun possession, just like an EMT calling ahead for trauma or stroke protocols. It puts everyone on high alert!
Restaurant food is optimized for everything but healthfulness.
Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.
Grow up Goldman.
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