Update on Cancer Surgery and What It Means for AI
This is roughly the one-month anniversary of the surgery that removed a significant portion of my guts, taking the cancer with it. I thought I would talk about a couple of points around that almost-anniversary.
Still not dead. Whether that is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.
Access to health insurance is not the same as access to health care. We tend to think of them as connected because of the history of health care financing in America, but they are not entirely the same thing. I wrote about this earlier, but even with excellent health insurance, I almost had to choose between a significant outlay or not having a test my doctor needed on the schedule the doctor said was required for my health. Post surgery, I still have thousands of dollars in “skin the game” that I owe. It is going to be a significant drag on my personal finances for a while. The situation is better than before Obamacare, mind you. There are no lifetime limits on care anymore, the presence of cancer can no longer be used to deny me insurance, and my yearly out of pocket is capped. But still — this is the only industrialized nation where lifesaving care comes with potentially life altering debt. Better is not the same as good, at least not in this case.
I do not feel well, not yet. I improve each day, but because the surgery went through my abdomen, sitting can be painful, wearing pants can hurt, and I am limited in what I can do physically. I also seem to have developed insomnia since the surgery. I rarely get more than a couple hours sleep a night now. Having whined all that, though, I am very grateful to have had this surgery now. Because of advances in technology, the surgery required much smaller incisions than it would have a few years ago, and my oncologist can run a genetic mapping test to see if I should be on chemo or not. It is all really remarkable.
Imitative AI received about 5.4 billion dollars in funding in 2023, a drop from 2022. That is only venture capital funding, by the way. it does not cover government or foundation funding — numbers on which I could not find. possibly because Google has used AI to ruin search. Now, that is a drop in the bucket compared to the funding for medical research (NIH in the US spent 18.9 billion dollars by itself, for example), but it is not nothing. And the medical research has a much higher rate of returns and much more societal benefit than imitative AI. The point is that we are terrible at allocating research money in this country. Since a handful of companies monopolize the tech space, normal market forces cannot discipline them away from the waste of imitative AI. And since Wall Street is only interested in huge, short-term payouts, money flows to the Hot New Thing, even if it is only lukewarm at best. In a rational world, every dime spent on imitative AI would have bene spent on something productive and valuable, like medical care and/or research. Instead, we waste billions of dollars on systems that plagiarize real creativity in order to tell you to put glue on your pizzas. We should do better than this.
It is nice having an audience, no matter the size. The first couple of weeks after the surgery were very rough, and I appreciate having this newsletter to distract me and all the good wishes from the readers. Thank you for your time, and I hope you continue to enjoy these ramblings.