I’m never sure how to answer this because the concept of universal healthcare being a debate is strange to me, often it seems to coincide with “free” healthcare debates but the two seem quite different to me. Isn’t healthcare universal in countries like the US too? The problem being rather that it will bankrupt your family for 3 generations if you have to actually use it unless your employer values you staying alive instead of using the threat of death and disease as leverage to make you work harder for less pay. But that’s more a problem of universal insurance rather than universal healthcare itself, right? Anyone could still get treated if they accept the financial consequences. The system sucks, but still seems universal to me (again, universal insurance is the problem).
It’s not free over here, but everyone needs to have health insurance, and you get some subsidies to pay for it if you have a very low income. After a few decades of neoliberalism the subsidies are not sufficient, there’s an amount each year that you have to pay yourself, and hospitals are permanently nearly overwhelmed. But the financial amounts are much smaller compared to what someone in the US would be faced with (150-200 euros/month insurance, max 450 euros/year you have to pay yourself). There are waiting lists but despite memes I’ve seen of “yeah it’s more affordable in Europe but they never get treatment due to waiting lists”, I’ve never had to wait for actually urgent care, stuff I could do any time had some wait time but nothing crazy (few weeks, rarely 1-2 months for very in-demand optional stuff), and I believe overworked hospitals with crazy waiting lists are still much worse in (some) American hospitals compared to here. But I’m basing that off tv shows and movies where people have to wait for hours in the emergency department, not sure how realistic that is. By the way visits to the GP are free and I’ve never had to wait more than a day for an appointment. When I had something more serious I could stop by the GP instantly regardless of the appointment schedule.
Basically if you compare it to the situation a few decades before it’s worse, and some other European countries have better systems IMO. Compared to the US, which is the only country I know of where universal VS non-universal health care is a topic of debate, i can’t think of a single dimension in which it is not an upgrade, perhaps with the exception of shareholder profits (but even then a full economic argument wouldn’t work based on that, because sick or dead citizens don’t work very well).
Netherlands
AI already has superhuman abilities in many areas, and has for decades, that’s the whole point of using it normally. We use computational intelligence in the form of optimisation algorithms for high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems, machine learning and deep learning for complex non-linear function fitting, exact methods for SAT solving and verification tasks, etc etc. We can’t do that very well ourselves, so it’s useful to have.
Now that we have LLMs to emulate human speech and are using them as an IO wrapper for more traditional systems, it’s tempting to just call that “an AI” with superhuman abilities, but these are the just the same highly effective methods that we’ve always used (in a best case) or unreliable approximations (more likely for LLM agent stuff). None of that suggests anything like sentience or the desire to rule over humans.
I find autonomous weapon systems much scarier than the classic AI overlord scenario. No consciousness or rebellion required, just a killer drone swarm that failed to recognise its termination conditions (or was instructed to keep going)…