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> In the future, you will go to a special dental imaging facility where a modestly-compensated technician images your whole mouth and feeds the results into an AI system, and when you get home you can look at the assessment and chat with the AI about it. Then you can potentially go visit a dentist, oral surgeon, etc, if you actually need work. This system will produce far better dental health outcomes at far lower cost: the diagnoses will be more accurate, and there will be no bias towards additional, unnecessary procedures.

Right up until the sellers of dental supplies find a way to...

Indirectly influence model training to increase the frequency with which models recommend dental work and/or lower the bar for what they determine to be "necessary"...

or...

Directly influence model recommendations by paying model providers (who will be happy to take that money).

The point being that models (and particularly the humans that control them) are presumably just as corruptible as the humans they are replacing.

by HDThoreaun6 hours ago|

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The advantage is scale. If a dentist is shady and overprescribes it can be difficult to find out because there are not many victims. If a company serving millions of people is overprescribing there’s a much higher chance of them getting called out on it.

by emacdona5 hours ago|

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That's the optimistic take. I have a much more pessimistic take: there is now only one place where people who want to sell dental devices have to focus their efforts. Less effort for them... and because of the scale... much bigger payoff.

When I was thinking of the examples I gave (poison the training and/or pay the providers), I was intentionally drawing analogs to how I saw Google search decline.

First, SEO "experts" poisoned the results. Then Google saw how much money could be made, and they sold the ad space directly to marketers. If you search for "Best <widget> for <doing something>" on Google, I am certain you are not getting the "correct" answer. And Google has suffered no consequences for this. To the contrary: it has been extremely lucrative.

by I-M-S4 hours ago|

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Unfortunately in the real world it's just the opposite. A guy selling opioids on the street is called a dealer and gets arrested. A company overprescribing opioids to millions is called Purdue Pharma and gets record profits.

by HDThoreaun4 hours ago|

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People are now aware of the harms Purdue has caused. Justice has not been served, but their plot has been uncovered and discerning consumers need not engage with them.

by BobaFloutist5 hours ago|

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Ah, you're saying that a monopoly protects the consumer from anti-consumer practices?

by HDThoreaun4 hours ago|

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Journalists protect consumers from anti consumer practices. There’s not enough money in journalism to go after individual dentists even though many are bad actors. There certainly is enough to go after corporations, which we have seen many times. I’m not saying justice will be served, but I do think more public oversight = better informed consumers. There really is no good way to know if a dentist is honest before going to see them. That’s just not true when it comes to mega corps.

by lbrito5 hours ago|

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No one wants that. People pay other people to do things well. No one wants to need to discuss orthodontics with a bot, they would rather pay someone to know those things and think about them.