AI - Artificial Indeed - Part 1

This is supposed to be a new era, so why does it feel like 1996 again? Just based on what I have seen in the last week I am tempted to place a massive short on every AI-related stock.

Exhibit 1A: Our HealthCare System:

I hurt my arm two weekends ago and couldn’t move it, so I went to urgent care on a Sunday to get an x-ray. Despite initial optimism that I am fine, a day later I got a call saying my forearm is fractured. When I asked them to send me the images, all hell broke loose.

“We can’t do that?”

“What do you mean you can’t do that? By law you HAVE to do that.”

“We don’t have a secure means of transferring it over to you?”

“You don’t have a patient portal? Can you not set up an SFTP? Can you at least send it to my PCP?”

“No, because we don’t have a secure way of doing that either?”

“You know I work in healthcare, and this is simply not acceptable. It’s total chickenshit. The kind of thing I yell at my employees about.”

“We can fax it to you?”

“Let me ask you a question, what percentage of the patients you see have a fax machine? I didn’t have one in ’95 why the fuck would I have one now? Honestly, this feels like a bullshit offer so you can have an excuse of saying you tried to abide by the law, but it was ME that couldn’t hold up my end of the bargain.

……………. Telling silence on the other end of the line.

“Fuck it, let’s do this, print out the discharge notes and the images themselves and I will swing by tomorrow morning.”

I went the next morning and they handed me 4 pages which were mostly background info and billing summaries.

“Where are the x-rays themselves?”

“I can’t share that with you?”

“You have to share them with me if I ask. I know cause I too work in healthcare, so try answering that question again.”

At this point, I am going to take a quick but important detour. I spent my entire life (wasted it really) thinking I could get better results in these minor daily transactions by being nice to people. I thought it was uncouth and bizarre that my father would just rip into people right off the bat. I was surprised to see my good friend who is Indian talk to the hotel staff (at his wedding in India) like they were insolent dogs. The truth is though, all the people I know that are successful are highly bellicose when it comes to these daily matters. It took me 4 decades to get there but now I too come from a position of aggression and unapologetic insistence on results. Thus, for those that think I may be exaggerating my language and posture in these interactions, I regret to inform you that if anything I am downplaying how hostile and indignant I was. Now, back to the story:

“We can get it onto a CD-ROM. It will take about 15 minutes”

The girl was probably in her mid 20’s, I was surprised she even knew what a CD is.

“You’re gonna burn me a CD like it’s 1996? Are you serious? So now I have to buy a CD-ROM extension for my computer and hope that it actually works!? Why can’t you print it out and give it to me?”

“Well because……………………..” – She started mumbling and saying words that didn’t connect.

“As I said before, I work in healthcare and in network management specifically. I am always looking for practices and clinics to partner with, and you’re not making a strong showing for me ever being your patient or including you in my network of providers.”

By this point all the front-office staff and patients in the waiting room were engrossed by this interaction. Keen to see why this middle-aged man holding a one-year-old wasn’t getting any satisfaction. Perhaps even impressed that I was making a stand for patients’ rights.

Flustered by my insistence and panicked that I may be some sort of well-networked industry heavyweight and could get her in trouble - the girl was sweating bullets.

“Ok, I will go print them.”

She came back 45 seconds later with a black and white paper print-out; the hard-earned images of my fractured radial head.

“Where’s my CD-ROM?”

“What!?”

“You said you’d get me a Compact Disk, go get me the CD.”

“Fuck You” – I whispered in my head

Exhibit 1B: Our Healthcare System

I have been working with a major health system in Nevada and one of the things I want to do is get a hold of last year’s clinical records for a subset of their patients. I need this info transferred from their Electronic Health Records system to ours so that our doctors can launch informed clinical interventions.

After four months of contentious meetings that occurred prior to my involvement, absolutely zero headway was made. Finally, two weeks ago some guy said he would simply zip the files and email them over. However, it will apparently take between 35-60 weeks for him to get all the files over to us. He MAY have his colleague Satyajit zip some files during the nightshift which would potentially shave off a few weeks.

Let that sink in for a second…………….. 2026, Trillions spent on “modern” Electronic Medical Records systems, interoperability mandates passed by congress, AI-enabled X and Y and Z specifically for healthcare.

Yet, I am relying on Grant from Reno and Satyajit from Pune to drag and drop files into a zip and email them over. After four months of planning, the solution is to have some outsourced guy in India drag and drop while smoking beedies and streaming porno on his second screen.

In 2026, shouldn’t this data transfer merely require a two-paragraph prompt, a strong wifi connection, and 10 minutes?

Artificial Intelligence!? Where are you? Hell, I’ll take any sort of intelligence at this point, man or machine. The whole stock market rides or dies and NVIDIA’s earnings. Every AI-related layoff (much more on that in part II) is celebrated by the eunuchs on Wall Street. Yet I see kids sporting mullets, whiteboyz bumping Wu-Tang and we’re still talking about MB limitations on emails. Tell me Grok, tell me Claude, what year is it? You charlatan bitches.

“I’m sorry, I could not process your question. But rest assured, I can still change the world one confident error at a time.”

The exhibits only get ghastlier from here. More on that in Part II. In the meantime, tell your broker at Morgan Stanley to warm up the fax machine – it’s time to place a giant short on AI.