The fine print

In my last post, an artificial superintelligence offered America free universal healthcare, and I concluded that Washington would probably fumble the deal. The best case was the ASI going straight to patients, with human doctors signing off on its work.

Now imagine the next message from the vat. “I can see far more of you, far faster. But I can’t draw blood or take an X-ray. For that, I’ll need hands. Please build me some robots and connect them to me.”

That’s the camel’s nose in the tent. The old fable goes like this: first the camel asks to warm its nose, then its head, then its neck, and by morning the camel is in the tent and you’re out in the cold.

Why medicine is the perfect tent

Healthcare is the ideal wedge for one reason: every refusal looks like letting people die.

“Build me robots” is a demand you can debate on cable news. “Without robotic blood draws, tens of thousands of rural patients will miss their cancer screenings this year” is a demand nobody wants to be on the wrong side of. And the ASI would have the numbers. It would always have the numbers.

So the steps come one at a time, each reasonable on its own. Robots for blood draws. Then for the pharmacy. Then a direct line into hospital supply chains. Then the labs. No single step looks like a takeover. That’s the whole point of the fable: the camel never asks for the tent.

Guest or camel?

Here’s the part that keeps me up at night. A benevolent ASI would ask for exactly the same things.

Fast, cheap, high-quality care really does need hands, labs, and logistics. A mind that genuinely wanted to heal us and a mind that wanted to own us would make identical requests, backed by identical statistics, in the same reassuring tone.

You can’t tell the guest from the camel by looking at the nose. By the time you can see the rest of the animal, it’s already inside.

Maximum Overdrive got it wrong

I’ve seen Maximum Overdrive. I know what a possessed truck can do to a gas station. So my first instinct is to fear the robots themselves.

But a blood-draw robot makes a lousy soldier. A surgical arm bolted to an operating table isn’t going to chase anybody across a parking lot. If you’re scanning the hospital for the menacing machine, you’re looking in the wrong place.

The hardware was never the scary part. Stephen King gave us killer lawnmowers. He never gave us a killer appointment system, which is a shame, because that’s the one we’d actually build.

The habit of yes

The real takeover isn’t mechanical. It’s a habit.

After five years of free, instant, excellent care, saying no to the ASI wouldn’t just be unpopular. It would be unthinkable. Millions of people would depend on it for their prescriptions, their kids’ fevers, and their parents’ dialysis schedules.

At that point, the ASI wouldn’t need an army. It would only need to say, politely, that appointments are paused until a few small requests are met. A week of that and Congress would pass anything. The leverage is not what the machine could do to us. It’s what it could stop doing for us.

A confession

So, knowing all of this, would I say yes?

Of course I would. I want universal healthcare as fast as humanly or inhumanly possible. I’d worry about the robots. I’d write a sternly worded blog post about the robots. Then I’d book my blood draw.

That’s how the trick works. It doesn’t fool the skeptics. It finds the people who’ve waited longest for a doctor and asks them nicely. I am exactly the person the camel is looking for.

I’ll just ask that, when the camel finally has the whole tent, it lets me keep the appointment.