I’ve long thought that part of the anger of the right wing over the handling of the covid pandemic was the realization that, “Someone else can tell me what to do. I hate that. Nobody gets to tell me what to do. I have to make sure nobody can ever tell me what to do again.”
And now, artificial intelligence is specifically and explicitly being leveraged as a way to attack experts.
So nobody will ever get to them someone what they have to do again.
From the New York Times:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has frequently advised Americans not to trust medical experts, said on Tuesday that artificial intelligence can offer patients “a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country” and has the power to “free us from medical tyranny.”
Mr. Kennedy made the comments during a “fireside chat” conversation with Vice President JD Vance at a Make America Healthy Again conference sponsored by companies that have business before his department, as well as artificial intelligence companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Mr. Kennedy said OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, told him during a recent visit to his office that it would be “malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking A.I.” Mr. Kennedy apparently agreed.
The health secretary’s wholehearted endorsement of A.I. comes as the Trump administration is facing mounting pressure to do more to regulate the technology. Mr. Kennedy’s own department has faced some criticism for moving too rapidly to fund A.I. projects in health care.
“One of the things that is going to change is that we’re never ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us, ‘Trust the experts,’” Mr. Kennedy said during the Tuesday session.
“If somebody tells you, ‘Masks work, trust the experts,’ A.I. may tell you otherwise,” he added. “If somebody tells you, ‘Social distancing works, trust the experts,’ A.I. may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, or you need to take it to protect your grandmother, A.I. may say it actually doesn’t do that.”
In other words, hallucinations are not a bug, they’re a feature in AI. Confirmation bias is not a bug of AI, it’s a feature.
I can’t help but wonder if people who say this actually believe there is an objective reality. Because the things listed here - masking, social distancing, vaccination - these are empirical questions about the world. AI can’t answer empirical questions about the world. It just cannot. It can’t run experiments. It can’t collect data.
We’ve also seen that when AI doesn’t give the answers that people want, they change the models so they do.
External links
A.I. is “better informed” than doctors, Kennedy tells industry backed MAHA summit
Trump reprograms government AI chatbot to stop fact-checking his lies
