[ExI] AI 2027: A Realistic Scenario of AI Takeover

[John Clark]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2025 at 12:52 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

*> My story about the heroin addict was a refutation of the notion that
> losing health insurance is a death sentence. *


 *I don't know about heroin addicts but I'll tell you this, if my kidneys
were shot and I didn't have health insurance and I didn't have enough money
to pay for a kidney transplant or even dialysis then I would be a deadman
unless I took drastic action. So I would take drastic action. I would
commit a felony, stand around afterwards to make sure I was caught, and
then plead guilty. If I was given a suspended sentence I would immediately
commit a more serious felony to make sure I was sent to a penitentiary
because there I would receive proper health care. Either that or I'd try to
become a Canadian citizen. *

*Those options are totally fucked up, but it's not surprising because the
fundamental problem is that the US has by far the most fucked up healthcare
system in the world. Per capita we spend FAR more on healthcare than any
other nation on the planet but we certainly do NOT get the best healthcare
for that money. In terms of life expectancy the USA is not number 1, it is
number 49, Costa Rica, Estonia, Chile, Saudi Arabia and even Cuba all beat
the USA while spending much less on healthcare than we do. If you examine
all those 48 countries that beat us you will find one interesting pattern,
they all have universal healthcare coverage, but number 49, the USA, does
not. Do you think maybe just maybe we might be able to learn something from
those 48 countries? *

*I remember talking about this at length on this list about 10 years ago
and since then things have only gotten worse. So how could things be
improved, well let's see. Patented drugs in the United States are more than
three and a half times higher than in Canada even though the drugs are
manufactured in the US by a US company. This is because the Canadian
government pays the bill for prescription drugs and will not pay for a drug
if a government review board believes the cost is excessive. By contrast
in the US pharmaceutical companies can charge whatever the market will
bear. There's no central authority saying "we won't pay that much". Instead
prices are negotiated separately with hundreds of different insurance
companies,  pharmacies and healthcare systems, and that generates mass
confusion, inequality in pricing and mountains of paperwork. So the
solution to the high drug price problem is obvious. *

*Also, you no longer need a human doctor to diagnose your illness, an AI
can do a much better job and do it much MUCH cheaper, it can tell you what
drug to take and how much of it. Currently there are only two areas in
healthcare that still need a human, surgery and nursing care, and in 3 to 5
years even those occupations will be replaced by machines. I think the last
job to be replaced by a machine will be an orderly in a nursing home. *

*John K Clark  *
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