A story on the subject of AI causing a mental decl
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Posted On: 06/21/2025 10:11:24 AM
A story on the subject of AI causing a mental decline.
I was a young Respert24 at the time. Suited up and cruising from doctors office to doctors office in my new Mazda 6 company car. Insurance was paid by the company, as well as gas. I only had to get 8 solid interactions with clinicians a day, and many days you could get that by lunch. And lunches, by the way, were always a great way to ensure you had quality time with the providers of any given clinic. Plus you got to pick the food in most cases and eat for free. Hard to beat.
As many clinics used to be, the clinic I'm thinking of was a lunch-only office. You might be able to leave samples and get the doc to sign your computer from a distance on any given day, but if you wanted to talk you only could do that during lunch. Which was, of course, covered by the company.
I'll always remember this lunch because I got to know the doctor's story in a way that I still think about a decade later. Here's why.
The doc was from a third world country where medical supplies were hard to come by and methods used were often one or more recommendations behind the western world where new equipment and new medications were more plentiful.
I asked him if that made his transition to medicine in the U.S. harder and was surprised hear him explain that it actually gave him an advantage.
Why?
Because he treated patients that were often much further along in disease than people get here in the states where medicine and access to it is far more prevalent. But also because he didn't have the fanciest equipment or the latest medications. He had to work with less, and as a result he learned how to do things manually that machines now do. If the machine breaks that runs the test, analyzes the data, and spits out a recommendation is down, there aren't many people who can jump in and do it the old fashioned way. He could. Plus if someone came in with a common condition that had advanced well past what anyone in the states would ever see, he was able to arrive at a diagnosis and treatment plan more efficiently than the students here who had to narrow it down from many other conditions that presented similarly.
Which correlated with another time a doctor/friend of mine told me about the day he walked past a room in the hospital while doing rounds and stopped when he heard someone with a unique cough. He went in to check on the patient, reading the chart and realizing that while he recognized the sound of whooping cough immediately, most of the docs and nursing staff weren't old enough to have ever encountered a patient with it. So that person had been in for days, suffering from a cough that hadn't been diagnosed properly.
AI is going to remove so much knowledge and know-how from the youth of today that I worry about what happens when X years into fully integrated AI use in our lives and offices and hospitals, the system goes down at the wrong time. Or gets corrupted in some way. Hijacked. Whatever.
Who is going to know how to do anything to get sick people treated without it? To get reports done for the big meeting?
At that point we'll be one big AI crash from a fast descent into Idiocracy. Assuming we aren't already watering plants with Mountain Dew by that point anyway. It's got what plants crave!
I was a young Respert24 at the time. Suited up and cruising from doctors office to doctors office in my new Mazda 6 company car. Insurance was paid by the company, as well as gas. I only had to get 8 solid interactions with clinicians a day, and many days you could get that by lunch. And lunches, by the way, were always a great way to ensure you had quality time with the providers of any given clinic. Plus you got to pick the food in most cases and eat for free. Hard to beat.
As many clinics used to be, the clinic I'm thinking of was a lunch-only office. You might be able to leave samples and get the doc to sign your computer from a distance on any given day, but if you wanted to talk you only could do that during lunch. Which was, of course, covered by the company.
I'll always remember this lunch because I got to know the doctor's story in a way that I still think about a decade later. Here's why.
The doc was from a third world country where medical supplies were hard to come by and methods used were often one or more recommendations behind the western world where new equipment and new medications were more plentiful.
I asked him if that made his transition to medicine in the U.S. harder and was surprised hear him explain that it actually gave him an advantage.
Why?
Because he treated patients that were often much further along in disease than people get here in the states where medicine and access to it is far more prevalent. But also because he didn't have the fanciest equipment or the latest medications. He had to work with less, and as a result he learned how to do things manually that machines now do. If the machine breaks that runs the test, analyzes the data, and spits out a recommendation is down, there aren't many people who can jump in and do it the old fashioned way. He could. Plus if someone came in with a common condition that had advanced well past what anyone in the states would ever see, he was able to arrive at a diagnosis and treatment plan more efficiently than the students here who had to narrow it down from many other conditions that presented similarly.
Which correlated with another time a doctor/friend of mine told me about the day he walked past a room in the hospital while doing rounds and stopped when he heard someone with a unique cough. He went in to check on the patient, reading the chart and realizing that while he recognized the sound of whooping cough immediately, most of the docs and nursing staff weren't old enough to have ever encountered a patient with it. So that person had been in for days, suffering from a cough that hadn't been diagnosed properly.
AI is going to remove so much knowledge and know-how from the youth of today that I worry about what happens when X years into fully integrated AI use in our lives and offices and hospitals, the system goes down at the wrong time. Or gets corrupted in some way. Hijacked. Whatever.
Who is going to know how to do anything to get sick people treated without it? To get reports done for the big meeting?
At that point we'll be one big AI crash from a fast descent into Idiocracy. Assuming we aren't already watering plants with Mountain Dew by that point anyway. It's got what plants crave!
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