Fuck AI

That few? I suspect underreporting. Or that AI use for medical assistance is much more common in the United States than in Britain.

In the "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme" department. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao wanted to modernize China's medical system to be the equal of any Western country's. The trouble was, China didn't have enough doctors trained in Western medicine. It didn't even have enough doctors to teach the doctors they would need. So Mao gathered together a bunch of folk healing traditions and made college courses and degree programs based on them. He called the whole thing "traditional Chinese medicine" and it's practitioners "doctors". And he sent those TCM practitioners out to the villages, because even though they weren't actual trained doctors, they were better than nothing.

The United States is in the same boat now. We don't have enough doctors. And we're never going to have enough doctors because the medical establishment, and the private hospital establishment, and the health insurance establishment, and basically everyone who touches medicine for profit in our fucking capitalist country, all benefit from keeping the cost of medical care high. And one of the ways they do that is by keeping the supply of medical care artificially low.

So yeah, we're rolling out medical advice chatbots. And yeah, they fucking suck. But the alternative isn't a competent medical professional. Half of the United States can't afford a competent medical professional, and most of the other half has to wait weeks to get one. So if the alternative to a chatbot is Dr. Google, M.D., or the daycare owner moonlighting as a cuandera, or Ivermectin Joe pedaling supplements on Facebook? Give me the fucking chatbot.