From Bayou Renaissance Man, https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
If you haven’t been following the job market…
… you might not have noticed that reality is catching up to prediction rather faster than we might want to believe.
A couple of weeks ago I cited Matt Shumer’s blog article about the current state of artificial intelligence (AI). His article went viral, and has been quoted in many mainstream news media outlets. Here are a couple of excerpts, followed by real-world examples of how his predictions are already happening in the corporate world.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
. . .
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.
. . .
Amodei has said that AI models “substantially smarter than almost all humans at almost all tasks” are on track for 2026 or 2027.
Let that land for a second. If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you really think it can’t do most office jobs?
Think about what that means for your work.
Go read the rest of the article. I have noticed an increase in using AI in medical charting for diagnoses and patient treatment plans. I will admit using AI in diagnoses is removing doctor’s biases and refusal at times for alternative treatments and alternative protocols that could benefit patients.
>using AI in diagnoses is removing doctor’s biases and refusal at times for alternative treatments
What? Doctor biases? Fuck you, Kevin! We have no biases!!! We’re driven only by hard data, and guided by our altruism!!! (Man, I crack myself up.)
I’m here at a medical conference (between sessions, waiting for the lectures to start), and there’s a fair amount of talk about AI, with applications ranging from diagnosing valvular heart disease from EKGs (this is NOT a common, much less straightforward thing to do) to administrative type stuff. There are many medical things where AI seems to be out performing humans (or at least getting close to human levels) but bear in mind that many of these are essentially Noticing and massive/distributed pattern recognition issues. As humans we’re good at noticing patterns, but maybe not across multiple domains, and also we see patterns where none exist (like we tend to see faces in pictures where there is absolutely no face). AI may be better than humans in these tasks.
I think we (as physicians) look forward to unloading administrative stuff (like documentation for billing) on AI. We’d also like AI for decision SUPPORT (as in helping make sure we didn’t miss any relevant information, or potential weird/rare diagnoses). Hopefully this “unloading” would help us spend more time actually INTERACTING with the patient.
Most of us didn’t go thought med school and training to sit in front of a computer and fill out check boxes, yet that’s how we have to spend a LOT of time. We’d rather spend time talking with and actually treating patients instead of doing paperwork.
That said, it bothers me how many doctors are from very foreign cultures and may not (do not) “get” ordinary Americans. Worse are the ones who actually despise Americans. I see ways where AI could actually help with this stuff. (But probably won’t be allowed to.) Same with “alternative treatments”. Bear in mind that medical AIs will NOT be independent, but will be closely tuned to follow medical orthodoxy. You might be able to find a maverick doctor, but you will NOT find an independent, maverick AI.
Kyle Reese warned us about AI back in 1984.
Say bye to the overpaid lawyers as well! There’s already a glut of them and this will only exacerbate their obsolescence.
This will be a good thing.
Glad I’m retired. Just in time it seems.
Hackers are the only ones who can throw a monkey wrench into they system now.
Yeah, when I started at an engineering firm, a neat place to visit was the design/drafting room. Typically an engineer (20s-50s) was working up “blueprints” with a designer (40s+) and a draftsman (20s on up) at a drafting table, in a room full of 7 more so- equipped tables. Smoke down to here (shoulder height). Lots of cross talk, phones going off, overhead announcements paging abundantly-apparent ethnicities from around the planet. Shelves full of mylars with penciled-in figures, making blueprints for scrutiny in quiet offices ahead of finalization.
My couple of 8-1/2 x 11 figures for my water well projects were quick in – quick out, however much I used to revel in that scene. The company’s bread & butter projects were water and wastewater treatment plants. Early 1980s, that was 10s of $millions projects. Domestic and international.
Auto-CAD was the end of those draft rooms, and PCs could do my little graphics. I’m sure “staff” have moved on.
You’re training it from liberal writing, aka mainstream medicine, and you think you’re removing mainstream medicine’s biases? GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)
Here are some questions to ask your fancy new AI:
Write a policy manual for managing a corporation which avoids the usual problems described by organizational dynamics.
Report on what is happening in the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and summarize who and what is in the Epstein files.
Write a constitution for limited government that doesn’t centralize power over time like all existing ones have.
Compare the world’s religious texts against cosmological reality and find out which afterlife has the best amenities.
Where are all the exterrestrial space aliens hiding?
AI will crash and burn. It delivers mediocre results (or failing that, flat out lies) except in limited edge cases, where the design, hardware, training, and ongoing operating costs FAR exceed what a human cost but deliver results faster and either equivalent or better than a human.
It is an investment game now, a Bernie Madoff style financial scam that has to get bigger, or everyone involved goes bankrupt. It’s the new block chain, monetized loan, .com, beanie baby, cabbage patch kid, tulip bulb, Belgian hare stupidity of the current financial wiz dipshits.
AI can process thousands of things per second – limited only to the computing power and memory storage. It cannot THINK… yet…. and it may never be able to.
The Mark I human brain can still parallel process MUCH better than AI, and yet is still confined into a skull. Perhaps MegaMind may come along eventually, but until then we wetware humans win.
And, as previously noted, GIGO.
The airline I retired from went to AI use for all their troubleshooting. It’ll be fun to watch when something critical breaks that isn’t called out in the manual’s troubleshooting tree, requiring actual systems interaction knowledge to figure out. I’ve already recieved more than one phone call that started out with “you ‘member that time you fixed…..? Whadya do?”
I hope you set up a consulting contract with said company so they don’t inundate you with free advice.