I am working towards solving the problem of diagnostic labs that will soon have to, or are already coping with excess testing capacity built up for covid testing, and trying to leverage this additional capacity for the post-covid/EUA world. The solution will also address the market decentralization opportunity by spreading the testing demand (from providers and patients), away from a few big-name labs, to a larger number of smaller sized ones.

Very generally speaking, any successful idea accumulates adulteration over time as it is overused and over-exploited. The number of high quality instances do not decrease but have to be sifted out from a larger group. If the author hasn't realized this yet, he need not look far for numerous examples in writing, music, movies, startups; appealing to make a u-turn on the "madness" is futile.

And the investors will cry "fraud" and "scam" not for the wrong reasons alone. Fraud and scam artists will actually infiltrate the hacker community once they find out about the expansion (and dumbing down) of investor base.

For a time I was embarrassed to even admit that I read it. I still am. The book is full of incredible people and events that don't and should not make any sense to a rational person. So I have written off this book as a third class fantasy novel. BUT: what is important to me here more than the book's content is the personality of the people who like it (knowing the fact that the author presents this as true facts). Steve jobs seemed to have a need in supernatural / magic to be able to perform magic. This book (and probably others like it) kept reinforcing his belief and created distorted reality for him like he used to create for his employees.

salman khan? along with those names?

I'm sure Salman Khan would agree with you.

Now let's give it 50 years and we'll see how 'Global Free Education on any subject that matters' sounds.

You may be right - although I find myself inadequate to predict 6 months hence not to talk of 50 years. It just seemed the easiest 'odd man out' scenario so I commented.

The interesting bit is that in 50 years or so people will likely go "Salman Who?".

I won't judge siri, as I do not know the details of technology or the machine learning algorithms used by it, but I would say this much: your one line pitch might just impress some businessweek readers but I don't think a really cool technology needs punchlines like that (..apple II..) - your article sounds like its coming from a non-technical observer for a non-technical audience - and that would be okay if the product had passed the stage of hype into early stages of common usage.

At this stage though I am more interested in how is it different from 100s of other AI applications that failed to take over the world or become the next big thing.

My need to criticize primarily came from your last paragraph where you are appealing to developers to jump in without realizing that that segment of your audience looks not very respectfully at phrases like 'buckle up' and 'amazing ride'

looks great! only if you could make the gears move:)

The gears do move!

I am using firefox 5.. they don't appear to move in my browser.

If you really want to be linguistically accurate, just replace "killing" with "taking market share away from". Other than that in my humble opinion, the central point is trivial.

I am going slightly off topic here, but I wanna say I like the prospect of being able to save phone conversation for your record. But I was wondering about the legal implications of doing it without letting the other party know. Then I looked up this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United...

I would advise the author to check this out and see if he or the person he talked to was in one of the states that prohibit wiretapping without consent.

prat- AZ law states that at least one party must be informed that the call is being recorded. They monitor and record their calls for Q/A and I'm doing the same... Society would be better off if the common man had the same weapons as corporations to enforce accountability.

I totally agree. And I wish that this thing hurts them in some way. Having moved 3 times in last 3 years, I absolutely understand your situation of not being able to break up with an organization whether its a fitness center, cable company or a bank.

I've always wanted a device which would answer the phone and state 'This call may be recorded for personal assurance, press 1 to continue or hang up if you object to being recorded.' Then it would only ring through if they pressed one.

I doubt I'd have to even record calls as the dubious folks would just hang up.

(I wonder if this would be a salable Google voice feature)

I'm not sure that it does if the argument is ideological in nature. I'll give an example:

I believe hate speech and racist propaganda are examples of free speech protected by the Constitution in the US. I believe that it is wrong for governments to violate this right even if they don't enumerate it in the core of their system of laws. A sociological study showing clear and convincing evidence that hate speech and racist propaganda have bad results won't change my opinion that they're free speech that no government has a right to prevent.

I believe that no government has a right to prevent people from having medical tests done on themselves. The scope of any regulation must be limited to ensuring that labs collect specimens safely, conduct tests accurately and refrain from making false claims about the services they offer. If they are making false claims about what the test results mean, then existing consumer protection laws already apply.

Didn't read the whole paper, but the summary is idiotic.

GAO made undercover calls to the companies seeking health advice. ... GAO made undercover contact ... and asked about supplement sales ...

So it's not that the companies are pushing such things, it's that GAO prodded it out of them.

one donor who had a pacemaker implanted 13 years ago to treat an irregular heartbeat was told that he was at decreased risk for developing such a condition.

It's almost as if the person who wrote this doesn't understand that statistical likelihoods are not the same as ironclad facts. The above anecdote, seemingly included to shock us, seems like a perfectly reasonable outcome to me. There are plenty of people who aren't at risk genetically, who still end up with problems.

One donor was told that he was at below-average, average, and above-average risk for prostate cancer and hypertension.

Again, perfectly reasonable. It would seem that each company is testing for different SNPs. A given person's DNA can certainly read different ways when we're not reading the entire genotype, but just a limited (and potentially differing) set of sequences from within it. (However, I would hope that each of these tests included a description of which SNP are tested for, so that it's at least possible to interpret properly with research)

Also, none of the companies could provide GAO's fictitious African American and Asian donors with complete test results, but did not explicitly disclose this limitation prior to purchase.

I've only ever looked at 23andMe, but they certainly disclose this [1]. AFAIK, 23andMe is the best known of such companies (indeed, the only one I can name), and it has this disclosure. I think that, again, they're sensationalizing.

At this point I got disgusted and stopped reading.

[1] https://www.23andme.com/health/ethnicity/

ADDED as a follow-up to my comment about misunderstanding statistics. The proposal would have the consumer hearing this information through a filter of their MD. How many MDs really understand physics? How many of them are going to be able to explain the Bayes concepts behind "if your father and your uncle both have prostate cancer, then it doesn't double your risk...". Is making the MD the gatekeeper to this actually going to help?