#AI in environment

[innova7ions]

Meet the Future: Proactive AI Agents Changing Our World!

Agentic AI signifies a groundbreaking evolution in artificial intelligence, transitioning from reactive systems to proactive agents.

These advanced AI entities possess the ability to comprehend their surroundings, establish goals, and operate independently to fulfill those aims. In this video, we delve into how agentic AI is revolutionizing decision-making processes and taking actions autonomously without human oversight.

A prime example includes environmental monitoring systems that identify and respond to threats such as forest fires.

Discover the implications of this technology on our future!

Video Automatically Generated by Faceless.Video

For other details on other Generative AI Platforms - Visit our YouTube Channel - AI Innovations

or Visit our Website at INNOVA7IONS

#AgenticAI

#ArtificialIntelligence

[ai-innova7ions]

Video Automatically Generated by Faceless.Video:

Agentic AI refers to AI systems designed to operate as agents that can autonomously perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with their environment and other systems or agents. These AI agents are goal-oriented, capable of sensing their environment, processing information, and taking actions to achieve specific objectives. Unlike traditional AI, which may require explicit instructions for each task, agentic AI systems can act independently within predefined parameters to achieve their goals.

Key Features of Agentic AI:

Autonomy:Agentic AI systems operate independently, making decisions and taking actions without needing constant human supervision.Goal-Oriented Behavior:These AI agents are designed with specific goals or objectives, and they use their capabilities to work towards achieving these goals.Environmental Awareness:Agentic AI can perceive and interpret its environment using sensors, data feeds, or other inputs. It adapts its behavior based on changes in the environment.Decision-Making and Problem-Solving:These AI agents use algorithms to evaluate options, solve problems, and make decisions that align with their goals.Interactivity and Communication:Agentic AI can interact with other systems, agents, or humans, exchanging information and coordinating actions to achieve collective objectives.Learning and Adaptation:Some agentic AI systems can learn from their experiences, improving their performance and adapting to new challenges over time.Task Execution:These AI agents can execute tasks within their domain of expertise, whether it’s navigating a physical environment, processing data, or coordinating with other agents.

Benefits of Agentic AI:

Efficiency in Task Automation:Agentic AI can automate complex tasks, freeing up human resources for more strategic activities.Improved Decision-Making:By processing large amounts of data and considering multiple variables, agentic AI can make more informed decisions than humans might.Scalability:Agentic AI systems can be deployed at scale, managing large, complex operations across multiple domains simultaneously.Adaptability:These systems can adapt to new environments or changing conditions, ensuring that they remain effective even as circumstances evolve.Enhanced Collaboration:Agentic AI can work alongside humans and other AI systems, facilitating better teamwork and coordination, particularly in complex environments.Cost Savings:Automating routine or complex tasks with agentic AI can reduce labor costs and minimize errors, leading to significant cost savings.24/7 Operation:Like autonomous AI, agentic AI can operate continuously, providing services or monitoring systems around the clock.

Target Audience for Agentic AI:

Enterprise Operations:Large businesses use agentic AI to automate complex processes, manage supply chains, optimize logistics, and enhance customer service.Healthcare:Agentic AI is employed in personalized medicine, patient monitoring, and automated diagnostics, where it can operate independently to improve outcomes.Financial Services:Financial institutions leverage agentic AI for automated trading, risk assessment, fraud detection, and customer interaction.Robotics and Automation:In industries like manufacturing, agentic AI powers robots that can operate autonomously in dynamic environments, adapting to new tasks or challenges.Smart Cities and Infrastructure:Governments and urban planners use agentic AI to manage traffic, energy consumption, public safety, and other aspects of urban living.Agriculture:Agentic AI is applied in precision agriculture, where it manages crop monitoring, irrigation, pest control, and other tasks autonomously.Defense and Security:Defense organizations deploy agentic AI for autonomous surveillance, threat detection, and coordination of unmanned systems.Consumer Technology:In the consumer space, agentic AI powers smart assistants, autonomous home devices, and personalized user experiences.

Comparison with Autonomous AI:

Autonomy vs. Agency:While both autonomous and agentic AI operate independently, agentic AI is specifically designed to achieve defined goals within a particular environment, often interacting with other agents or systems to do so.Interaction:Agentic AI often involves more interaction, whether with humans, other AI agents, or systems, as it’s designed to work in a collaborative or multi-agent setting.

Agentic AI is particularly valuable in environments where collaboration, decision-making, and adaptive behavior are essential, offering significant benefits across various industries.

Credit: ChatGPT

[10001gecs]

one 100 word email written with ai costs roughly one bottle of water to produce. the discussion of whether or not using ai for work is lazy becomes a non issue when you understand there is no ethical way to use it regardless of your intentions or your personal capabilities for the task at hand

with all due respect, this isnt true. *training* generative ai takes a ton of power, but actually using it takes about as much energy as a google search (with image generation being slightly more expensive). we can talk about resource costs when averaged over the amount of work that any model does, but its unhelpful to put a smokescreen over that fact. when you approach it like an issue of scale (i.e. "training ai is bad for the environment, we should think better about where we deploy it/boycott it/otherwise organize abt this) it has power as a movement. but otherwise it becomes a personal choice, moralizing "you personally are harming the environment by using chatgpt" which is not really effective messaging. and that in turn drives the sort of "you are stupid/evil for using ai" rhetoric that i hate. my point is not whether or not using ai is immoral (i mean, i dont think it is, but beyond that). its that the most common arguments against it from ostensible progressives end up just being reactionary

i like this quote a little more- its perfectly fine to have reservations about the current state of gen ai, but its not just going to go away.

[tempestaurora]

is it worth using AI when it harms our planet?

sources:

https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt-energy-emergency-heres-how-much-electricity-openai-and-others-are-sucking-up-per-week

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/a-new-report-reveals-that-chatgpt-exorbitantly-consumes-electricity

https://www.semafor.com/article/12/18/2024/ai-energy-demand-raises-risk-of-blackouts-across-the-us

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist

Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you're a doctor, chances are you are required to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend two hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR.

How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in The American Prospect, Epic may be a clinical disaster, but it's a profit-generating miracle:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency."

In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno – a pregnant biologist – drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency – comparable to a major heart-attack – and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he'd put in charge of health care created the "Prospective Payment System," which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition and the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode "diabetes with no complications" from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60.

Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors' compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner's doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, "That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?"

Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine, he's got an insider's knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI.

The EHR industry's origins start with a GW Bush-era law called the HITECH Act, which was later folded into Obama's Recovery Act in 2009. Obama provided $27b to hospitals that installed EHR systems. These systems had to more than track patient outcomes – they also provided the data for pay-for-performance incentives. EHRs were already trying to do something very complicated – track health outcomes – but now they were also meant to underpin a cockamamie "incentives" program that was supposed to provide a carrot to the health industry so it would stop killing people and ripping off Medicare. EHRs devolved into obscenely complex spaghetti systems that doctors and nurses loathed on sight.

But there was one group that loved EHRs: hospital administrators and the private companies offering Medicare Advantage plans (which also benefited from upcoding patients in order to soak Uncle Sucker):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8649706/

The spread of EHRs neatly tracks with a spike in upcharging: "from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent…the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased":

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-18-00380.pdf

The purpose of a system is what it does. Epic's industry-dominating EHR is great at price-gouging, but it sucks as a clinical tool – it takes 18 keystrokes just to enter a prescription:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729481

Doctors need to see patients, but their bosses demand that they satisfy Epic's endless red tape. Doctors now routinely stay late after work and show up hours early, just to do paperwork. It's not enough. According to another one of Kuttner's sources, doctors routinely copy-and-paste earlier entries into the current one, a practice that generates rampant errors. Some just make up random numbers to fulfill Epic's nonsensical requirements: the same source told Kuttner that when prompted to enter a pain score for his TB patients, he just enters "zero."

Don't worry, Epic has a solution: AI. They've rolled out an "ambient listening" tool that attempts to transcribe everything the doctor and patient say during an exam and then bash it into a visit report. Not only is this prone to the customary mistakes that make AI unsuited to high-stakes, error-sensitive applications, it also represents a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of clinical notes.

The very exercise of organizing your thoughts and reflections about an event – such as a medical exam – into a coherent report makes you apply rigor and perspective to events that otherwise arrive as a series of fleeting impressions and reactions. That's why blogging is such an effective practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

The answer to doctors not having time to reflect and organize good notes is to give them more time – not more AI. As another doctor told Kuttner: "Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians."

EHRs are one of those especially hellish public-private partnerships. Health care doctrine from Reagan to Obama insisted that the system just needed to be exposed to market forces and incentives. EHRs are designed to allow hospitals to win as many of these incentives as possible. Epic's clinical care modules do this by bombarding doctors with low-quality diagnostic suggestions with "little to do with a patient’s actual condition and risks," leading to "alert fatigue," so doctors miss the important alerts in the storm of nonsense elbow-jostling:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058605/

Clinicians who actually want to improve the quality of care in their facilities end up recording data manually and keying it into spreadsheets, because they can't get Epic to give them the data they need. Meanwhile, an army of high-priced consultants stand ready to give clinicians advise on getting Epic to do what they need, but can't seem to deliver.

Ironically, one of the benefits that Epic touts is its interoperability: hospitals that buy Epic systems can interconnect those with other Epic systems, and there's a large ecosystem of aftermarket add-ons that work with Epic. But Epic is a product, not a protocol, so its much-touted interop exists entirely on its terms, and at its sufferance. If Epic chooses, a doctor using its products can send files to a doctor using a rival product. But Epic can also veto that activity – and its veto extends to deciding whether a hospital can export their patient records to a competing service and get off Epic altogether.

One major selling point for Epic is its capacity to export "anonymized" data for medical research. Very large patient data-sets like Epic's are reasonably believed to contain many potential medical insights, so medical researchers are very excited at the prospect of interrogating that data.

But Epic's approach – anonymizing files containing the most sensitive information imaginable, about millions of people, and then releasing them to third parties – is a nightmare. "De-identified" data-sets are notoriously vulnerable to "re-identification" and the threat of re-identification only increases every time there's another release or breach, which can used to reveal the identities of people in anonymized records. For example, if you have a database of all the prescribing at a given hospital – a numeric identifier representing the patient, and the time and date when they saw a doctor and got a scrip. At any time in the future, a big location-data breach – say, from Uber or a transit system – can show you which people went back and forth to the hospital at the times that line up with those doctor's appointments, unmasking the person who got abortion meds, cancer meds, psychiatric meds or other sensitive prescriptions.

The fact that anonymized data can – will! – be re-identified doesn't mean we have to give up on the prospect of gleaning insight from medical records. In the UK, the eminent doctor Ben Goldacre and colleagues built an incredible effective, privacy-preserving "trusted research environment" (TRE) to operate on millions of NHS records across a decentralized system of hospitals and trusts without ever moving the data off their own servers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

The TRE is an open source, transparent server that accepts complex research questions in the form of database queries. These queries are posted to a public server for peer-review and revision, and when they're ready, the TRE sends them to each of the databases where the records are held. Those databases transmit responses to the TRE, which then publishes them. This has been unimaginably successful: the prototype of the TRE launched during the lockdown generated sixty papers in Nature in a matter of months.

Monopolies are inefficient, and Epic's outmoded and dangerous approach to research, along with the roadblocks it puts in the way of clinical excellence, epitomizes the problems with monopoly. America's health care industry is a dumpster fire from top to bottom – from Medicare Advantage to hospital cartels – and allowing Epic to dominate the EHR market has somehow, incredibly, made that system even worse.

Naturally, Kuttner finishes out his article with some antitrust analysis, sketching out how the Sherman Act could be brought to bear on Epic. Something has to be done. Epic's software is one of the many reasons that MDs are leaving the medical profession in droves.

Epic epitomizes the long-standing class war between doctors who want to take care of their patients and hospital executives who want to make a buck off of those patients.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[popsicle-stick]

stupidest people on gods green earth

[progressive-memes]

[birdietrait]

hey remember that inzoi uses generative ai

[xinilia]

ok I just watched Ashly Burch’s (Aloy’s voice actor) video responding to the horrid ai Aloy thing going around, and let me just say, I respect the fuck out of her. For an actress who has such an intimate relationship with a game company (she provides both voice and mocap for Aloy— absolutely invaluable if they want to continue the franchise) she was fully transparent about how she disapproved of it and supported the current strike against video game acting to demand ai reforms. Which is just. Such a badass move.

Seriously all I could think the whole time was like “Aloy would sooo do this” LMAO 😭

[zorlok-if]

I fucking loathe this ad that keeps showing up on my dash.

How about "help me fight the person who created you"?

[whumpacabra]

I don’t have a posted DNI for a few reasons but in this case I’ll be crystal clear:

I do not want people who use AI in their whump writing (generating scenarios, generating story text, etc.) to follow me or interact with my posts. I also do not consent to any of my writing, posts, or reblogs being used as inputs or data for AI.

[yandere-daydreams]

please PLEASE I’m begging you to make a Yandere Childe bot on c.ai I love the way you write and I just want to have a little deranged version of him in my pocket!! If I can be greedy I’d love another Yandere Childe sex doll au too! I’m on my KNEES🙏

if i ever make a character ai of literally anything at any point i need someone to come to my house and break every bone in my body. if you want smut so bad then write it yourself. there's no soul in those machines and they do NOT know what it is to want to peg a fictional man.

[part-toons]

Mouthful of diamonds

inspired by this scene:

[maladaptivewriting]

if you use ai to come up with fic ideas, write fics for you, develop headcanons, or to help you play pretend in your mind about a fictional character, just know that i’m out there and i’m better than you. not only that.

i always will be.

[gezin-yazar]

[nestedneons]

By hakoniwa