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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

    But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

    Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.



  • For agencies that are “funded” by the companies they regulate, they sure give them a hard time and cost them a lot of money. Even the biggest pharmas spend a significant amount of resources erring on the side of caution over even minor details, so as to not have a regulator throw out their results and tell them to do it again. Which does happen sometimes.

    Of course no research review is flawless. If your standard is flawless, you’re deliberately setting an impossible standard for no discernable concrete benefit. But it’s rigorous, public, and the regulators have the authority to pull treatments off the market if post-approval research has troubling results. Which they do sometimes.

    This sort of asinine concern trolling is a serious danger to public health. It would be one thing if it was valid criticisms, of which there are plenty, combined with realistic proposals for alternatives. But it never is, and now we have nearly or previously eradicated diseases making a comeback.