My step mom was having debilitating pain. A year of going to doctors and no one was able to find a cause. I scanned her discharge paper work which had her prescriptions on it and gave it to Claude. It identified a prescription that had that exact side effect. They later confronted her primary care that concurred and took her off it.
A friend of mine's wife recently passed. They were chasing a suspected heart defect for over a year. She had been intermittently fainting. At about the year mark they decided to scope her digestive track. They found bleeding ulcers from cancer that was all over her body. I input her fainting symptoms into Claude and gastro impact was number two suspected after heart issues.
I have a few of other cases it's helped with. I'm not sure it could do worse than my own experience with the medical system. This is doubly true in places that lack any sort of medical care.
My father in law owns a small manufacturing business and is not technical at all. His computer skills stop with some CAD and basic excel. He pays for ChatGPT as does his wife and her kids. The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product. Almost every coffee shop I go to has people talking about AI and ChatGPT even in areas with no tech populations.
I still think it could crash, but it's got real users and a mind share like nothing I've ever seen.
I asked the OpenAI playground to compare and contrast the themes of Point Break and Fight Club. It did a bang up job and blew my mind. I then realized it basically worked for any of the scripts I had for my dev environment too. Fixing and expanding capabilities I'd wanted to had but never had the time to implement.
I just moved from a medium sized US city and any specialist provider I contacted for myself or my parents was 5 months or more. It's not good everywhere.
Starting to like the lack of memory. Claude remembers I have a grill and will interject in conversations about how maybe this thing would go well with BBQ when it's unrelated or just also about food.
It's yet another Goodhart's law effect:
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.
The legal history is a bit more complex. TLDR: assholes that were BASE jumping in Yosemite in the early 1980s did things like throw burning barrels off the top of El Capitan and take trucks on trails not designed for vehicle traffic.
Comparing the number of BASE jumpers (small thousands) and the number of hikers and climbers (millions) BASE jumpers just can't have the political influence for access.
> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
I started a project this year similar to this with rats. It’s now two axis with tracking and a stereo camera with depth detection. The amount of hours I’ve spent on it is astounding but I’ve learned a lot!
Also, ended up swapping the Pi I started with to a jetson.