SinAdjetivos

I thought the issue you had was with the information itself. Why does it "being a program" matter? That said, it is; "symptom checker" specifically and "page rank" more generally.

its too much of the wild west

And? There seems to be this assumption that "wild West" == bad/dangerous/scary/harmful. The modern Internet is certainly far less of the "wild West" it used to be. I would also argue it is also far more dangerous, harmful and nefarious than the "wild West" web.

the amount of people that have committ suicide after interacting with LLMs rather than seeing a mental health professional would be a fairly relevant example though.

Anecdotes aren't useless, but they need to be contextualized. Is it higher than the baseline? Is it greater then those who didn't commit suicide because when the mental health institutions failed them they at least had some sort of backup?

Navigating healthcare while dealing with a mental health issues is a paradox. Is the damage caused greater than the damage prevented from allowing access to a tool that can help lower that barrier to entry?

Looking at general trends I find that the harms outweighing the benefits very hard to believe. Do you have anything non-anecdotal, on that specific point, to back it up?

A program that can be very confidently wrong while giving people advice that can mess up their life

Literally WebMD.

I think there's an assumption that professionals are always correct. They are not. Professionals are also heavily trained to "[try] to make you happy and doesnt know if [they are] telling you right or wrong, only that [they] shouldnt say [they don't] know."

You're also neglecting how bad health care access, and legal etc., is. Especially in countries like the USA where access to healthcare is financially gated and increasing extraction makes "go[ing] to a professional" not possible unless you wait >6 months to go somewhere that's a >3hr commute from where you live. WebMD, Wikipedia and chatbots can help to decide whether the >$1,000 and 7hr professional consultation is worth it, and if so be more informed going in so that the time is better spent.

That being said, poor healthcare can absolutely have worse outcomes than no healthcare. I do believe that is a minority of situations, however I also lack any hard evidence to really back that up. Do you have any?

If that was the logic we were using then Wikipedia shouldn't be allowed to have articles on health and law either. WebMD shouldn't have ever been legal either.

Obviously, the benefits to having that information available outweigh the hypothetical negatives. Even with them being incorrect, partial and easy to draw invalid conclusions from, having the information be freely and readily accessible is better for everyone.

Modern capitalism derives it's scarcity via artificial means such as legislation.

The only thing this does is restrict the means of information to the people of NYC. Have you used traditional web search for health/legal/etc. advice? Even pre-2015 if you didn't know what you're doing you would get the most unhinged, predatory, incorrect advice imaginable, but legislating away access wasn't going to make health information more correct, accurate, or equitable. It would've just further entrenched the predatory health/legal/etc. industry as the gatekeepers of that knowledge.

This is no different.

People don't want to hear it, but this should be more common practice especially for human written code, and it's best if someone specializes in doing this sort of QA testing specifically.

Saying that empathy is reserved for things you're trying to fuck isn't the "Gotcha!" you think it is.

Again, says more about you than anything.

Literally what happened after the Taiping Rebellion. This is the historical reason for Afghanistan and The Golden Triangle region currently being the largest opium producers in the world.

Read up on the PRC's 1952 "Directive on Eradication of Drug Epidemic" and "mass line methodology" for how the "opium problem" was actually historically dealt with. Watching what the Taliban do over the next decade may also provide some insight.

https://flybrain.app/

I know you mean human brain, but the point is that the principles largely exist and the progress is accelerating.

However, one of the key learnings from the linked project is that the brain and body are intrinsically linked and biology is a nightmare mess of spaghetti code. Simulating just the brain has limited benefits and will not likely simulate a person or consciousness any more than simulating small pieces of a brain.

For some further reading: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030645222100021X (scihub)

That says more about how you treat your tools and view your material surroundings than speaking to any sort of universal truth.

To add onto this the Klamath peoples were notoriously individualistic and "industrious" in comparison to their neighbors and during the reservation period they did, comparitively, exceptionally well as there were similar cultural virtues around "profit". Thanks, in part, to both location and pre-contact culture they build a thriving lumber industry and by 1950 were one of the wealthiest tribes within the US and were the only tribes in the United States that paid for all federal, state and private services used by their members.

Obviously a 'worst case' for "raping the land for profit" right?

No. By 1950 the reservation has turned the "undesirable woodland" into a highly productive, healthy and sustainable forest and pastureland with by far the largest remaining stand of ponderosa pine in the west.

This, of course, could not stand and so the 1954 Klamath termination act was enacted. Originally the plan was to sell it all to private industry like Crown-Zellerbach, however the "lumber industry's concern with how the increase in Klamath Forest timber would saturate the industry" resulted instead in creating the Winema and Fremont National Forests. Which of course have been heavily logged and largely mismanaged, but not nearly as bad as the plan was and certainly worse than when humans were more active in helping to maintain it.

Skyscrapers operate on very different principles than a jenga tower, because you're thinking of it as one your intuition is going to be completely incorrect. It's not just a bunch of concrete blocks stacked on top of eachother, you can not build very tall using those concepts. Think of a skyscraper like a bunch of those tensegrity table things linked up to each other in an alternating/spiral configuration.^1^

A strong sideways push can break the balance and cause one floor to crash into the one below it, which breaks that central chain causing it to smash into the floor below it, etc. In order for it to "fall to the side" instead it would need to break both the center chain and at least 2 of the outer ones. You would think this means it only needs ~3x more energy is needed to tip it sideways, but you underestimate the power of leverage.

In short it needs a strong sideways push to fall down and it will collapse on itself, straight down, long before there's enough energy to cause it to "fall sideways".

^1 This comparison is only slightly more correct than the 'jenga tower' model, but I'm hoping it will help with conceptualizing and intuition. I would encourage you to look at the mathmatical models of skyscrapers, but that's left as an "Exercise for the reader"^

Skyscrapers are essentially a bunch of very heavy concrete+steel slabs with, comparably, weak spacers in between them. If one of the floors collapses on top of the other with enough speed/force to break the spacer it continues to fall unabated. Now it has double the weight and it's no longer static meaning that it's constantly accelerating due to gravity.

This cascades down every floor gaining increasing amounts of mass*speed(energy) and by the time it hits the foundation it's more powerful than any sort of "timed charge".

The amount of energy needed to start this cascade is several orders of magnitude less than what is needed to 'push it over'. By the time it's behaving under physics like the 'jenga tower' scenario you're envisioning it's <10% the height of the original structure.