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personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
A worrying new angle. What does a world with near infinite agency or will look like? For example, a government only has so much human resources to enforce speeding laws, but what if they can use AI agents to do that work? Now they can easily fine anyone going a hair over the speed limit. Or every human can get their own agents to extract value from the stock market. This totally upsets the balance of our systems. There will no doubt be some sort of AI response to equalize things, but that response always lags behind.
A fun little story about how overpaid and out-of-touch executives and outsourcing killed a business while blaming everyone else but themselves, with special help from AI!
Still, even then it seemed from the outside like Antonucci was cooking up a future for Providence Health Plan. On Linkedin, Antonucci styles himself as an expert on emerging technologies. “I write about what’s actually happening in AI and health care—not the hype, the operator reality,” he writes in his bio. “If that’s useful to you, follow along.” And through much of last year, he and his team worked to outsource a major Providence Health Plan line of business to a Silicon Valley company that touted its AI technology.
The company, Collective Health, was founded in 2013 and reports “success managing claims, eligibility, and benefits administration for the employer health plans we serve.”
But five current and former Providence Health Plan employees privy to the partnership tell WW it quickly became clear the company had had little experience actually adjudicating and processing health insurance claims, but that when they warned their bosses that the contractor was not up to the task, health plan leaders ignored them, plowed ahead and, in many cases, laid off those who raised concerns
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
This was interesting. My takeaway was that the data centers are this physical bottleneck that the previous decades of tech development hasn't had to deal with, it was almost all coding. Add to that the large, non partisan pushback against data centers and this seems like a genuine road block to squeeze in order to slow things way down.
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JeroenNot all those who wander are lostNetherlandsVeteran
Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:
Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two “hosts” discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.
I think it could be one of the funniest, closest endpoints to human civilization we’ve seen yet in our new AI-enabled world. If this sounds a little confusing, here’s an example. I tried it out for diaper rash cream, and, voila! A podcast! (Sound on.)
Note this is not an AI-generated review, it only talks about the reviews others have left on the site.
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personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
@Jeroen said:
Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:
Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two “hosts” discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.
I think it could be one of the funniest, closest endpoints to human civilization we’ve seen yet in our new AI-enabled world. If this sounds a little confusing, here’s an example. I tried it out for diaper rash cream, and, voila! A podcast! (Sound on.)
Note this is not an AI-generated review, it only talks about the reviews others have left on the site.
And we could have AI agents listening to the pitch to find the best diaper rash cream and buy it for us!
Relatedly, I actually kind of like AI debates on topics. They're free of ego and can listen and respond without all the reactiveness you tend to get in human debates. I find them much more informative and illuminating.
Comments
A worrying new angle. What does a world with near infinite agency or will look like? For example, a government only has so much human resources to enforce speeding laws, but what if they can use AI agents to do that work? Now they can easily fine anyone going a hair over the speed limit. Or every human can get their own agents to extract value from the stock market. This totally upsets the balance of our systems. There will no doubt be some sort of AI response to equalize things, but that response always lags behind.
A fun little story about how overpaid and out-of-touch executives and outsourcing killed a business while blaming everyone else but themselves, with special help from AI!
www.wweek.com/news/2026/05/27/inside-the-collapse-of-providence-health-plan/
Ah yes AI.
One more thing to worry about
This was interesting. My takeaway was that the data centers are this physical bottleneck that the previous decades of tech development hasn't had to deal with, it was almost all coding. Add to that the large, non partisan pushback against data centers and this seems like a genuine road block to squeeze in order to slow things way down.
Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:
Note this is not an AI-generated review, it only talks about the reviews others have left on the site.
And we could have AI agents listening to the pitch to find the best diaper rash cream and buy it for us!
Relatedly, I actually kind of like AI debates on topics. They're free of ego and can listen and respond without all the reactiveness you tend to get in human debates. I find them much more informative and illuminating.
You or your 'AI assistant' (not yet available) might find this of interest...
https://hackaday.com/2026/06/03/but-just-what-is-this-artificial-intelligence/
AI generated movie enters film festival lineup…