It’s not about whether the present AI bubble is a giant sham that’ll implode like a black hole, or if it’s the real deal and AGI is days away. It’s always been about framing the consequences of either outcome in a society where 99.9% of humans must work to survive, and the implications of a giant economic collapse on those least-able to weather its impact in a time of record wealth and income inequality. It doesn’t matter which side is right, because millions of people will lose their jobs as a result and thousands will die. That is what some of us are trying to raise the alarm about, and in a post-2008 collapse world, young people are absolutely going to do what it takes to survive rather than what’s best for society - which is going to have knock-on effects like the author described (labor shortages in critical fields) for decades to come.

In essence, if one paper from one guy managed to depress enrollment in a critical specialty for medicine, and he was flat-out wrong, then imagine the effects the Boosters and Doomers are having on other fields in the present cycle. If I were a betting dinosaur, I suspect there will be a similar lack of highly-skilled programmers and knowledge workers due to the “copilot tools will replace programmers” hype of present tools, and then we’ll have these same divorced-from-society hypesters making the same predictions again, ignorant of the consequences of their prior actions.

Which is all a lot of flowery language just to say, “maybe we need to stop evaluating these things solely as ways to remove humans from labor or increase profit margins, and instead consider the broader effects of our decisions before acting on them.”

While I don't think AI will be be banned wholesale from, say, interstate commerce despite it really should until the industry self regulates the moment it starts killing people in medicine there it will be banned. And it's obvious it'll kill people. For eg in radiology it'll add its bullshit to images which is just not there. And so forth. It's just a question of how and when , not if.

No dystopian novel has predicted how fucking mundane it'll be when AI begins to kill people.

Upshot of the article: we don't have enough radiologists because Geoffrey Hinton said in 2011 they wouldn't be needed.

Hinton have had an impact on people choosing radiology, I don't really know. But, in the US, demographers and old-guard types in the medical profession made a REALLY bad call much more than ten years ago, and cut the number of med school students they were calling for, and we all are living with the consequences.

If you're going to complain about Hinton you should at least normalize for the lack of doctors in other fields that he didn't call out as well. Boomers are consuming a LOTT of medical, and in the US we have knock-on effects from the opioid crisis. It was not a good idea to cut the physician recruitment and enrollment when they did, whether they did for principled reasons (We only need so many and this way we'll have the best), or for ... less principled ones (A legion of cheap young doctors competing for our jobs doesn't sound that great to the physician's board at this research hospital).