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Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

bbc.com

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Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#91

Post by adventured »

hmate9 wrote: post #74

Not sure why there is a lot of negativity here. It doesn't seem that ridiculous of a goal. I think by 2100 we will have extremely powerful AI that will make fighting diseases extremely easy compared to methods available today. To be honest, it seems like an achievable goal. I wish Zuckerberg and Chan the best in this.

> Not sure why there is a lot of negativity here.

Because there is a widespread dislike of Zuckerberg on HN and most other similar discussion forums. Happens in every thread about him. He's an uber billionaire that got rich serving ads on a social network that couldn't be any more mainstream at this point. Facebook is viewed mostly as a privacy invading corporate monster now by the crowd that dislikes Zuckerberg. He plans to donate all of his wealth and what you mostly saw on here in discussion was venom and conspiracy theories about how it was nothing but a tax dodge (which only betrayed the vast ignorance on tax laws).

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#92

Post by M_Grey »

adventured wrote: post #81
M_Grey wrote: post #66

I plan to conquer the world and all of its inhabitants... long after all of us here are dead or senescent. I guess it is easy to make empty statements if you make them apply to a far enough future. Mars colonies from Musk (still working on getting the colonists there in one piece of course), and all disease tackled!* *With $3Bn

The difference being that you don't have an army or the power necessary such that I'm going to consider your plans to be serious in the least. With $56 billion, I'm inclined to take Zuckerberg a lot more seriously. He currently has eight times the annual R&D budget of Pfizer in paper wealth that has been increasing in value at a rapid clip (emphasis on paper, in that of course it may go up a lot more or down a lot, w…

Well, to be fair I am responding to the grandiose statement that he made, not the more reasonable one that he could have made.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#93

Post by M_Grey »

jonknee wrote: post #78
M_Grey wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like comparing the discovery of a new fundamental force, with the discovery that mythical dragons have been living in secret among us as our lawyers. It's true that both are unlikely, but one is ridiculous and the other merely very very challenging.

I don't think it's all that ridiculous, it's over 80 years in the future. 80 years ago we were dying of all sorts of [now] easily preventable and curable diseases. Penicillin was not used until 1942!

And now it's practically useless. It's not a one-sided battle we're in, and we're heavily outnumbered.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#94

Post by kendallpark »

user731955373 wrote: post #90
kendallpark wrote: post #75

I'm glad they're putting money into medical research, but I kinda roll my eyes when people make big claims about curing X, especially when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer" or in this case, "all diseases." AI/ML has barely scratched the surface of its potential in medicine, however, I find it naive to think that you can throw AI/ML at any random disease and always get a cure. Even after a century. Will we…

"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.

Which is a remarkable scientific achievement, independent of its use.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#96

Post by notahacker »

idlewords wrote: post #65

Pharmacology is an interesting example where better technology and scientific understanding have made things worse than earlier, low-tech methods ("inject plant extracts into animals and see what happens"). The number of new drugs discovered per dollar of research has been dropping since 1960, and obvious explanations (like "the easy ones have already been found") turn out not to explain the phenomenon. [ http://www.…

I can't speak for the past, but I think the big deal for the testing of the future will be shifting from "forty percent of the test subjects responded positively to the drug; none of the side effects were that bad" to "80% of test subjects carrying thought-to-be-marginally-relevant gene Y showed positive responses to the drug but none carrying gene Yvariant; those also carrying not-suspected-of-be-relevant gene X exhibited much stronger side effects"

That should make initial testing a lot more expensive, but in the long run launches of new drugs less risky.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#97

Post by mmaunder »

kafkaesq wrote: post #79
hmate9 wrote: post #74

Not sure why there is a lot of negativity here. It doesn't seem that ridiculous of a goal. I think by 2100 we will have extremely powerful AI that will make fighting diseases extremely easy compared to methods available today. To be honest, it seems like an achievable goal. I wish Zuckerberg and Chan the best in this.

I think by 2100 we will have extremely powerful AI that will make fighting diseases extremely easy compared to methods available today. Right. Just like the jetpacks and lunar colonies we have easy access to now, as promised in the 1960s.

As soon as we stop calling categorization algorithms "machine learning". It doesn't help to not know what machine intelligence isn't.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#98

Post by jychang »

Animats wrote: post #73

Probably not feasible without some genetic re-engineering to design out vulnerabilities to common diseases. That's how aging will probably be solved. There's a big debug time problem, though. It takes about two generations to be sure you got it right. We'll probably have very long lived mice decades before it works for humans. (Many cancers in mice can be cured now. This doesn't translate to humans.) Then there will…

> Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically.

I don't think this will be a problem if you get to the point of genetically engineering people. You just can't mate the old fashioned way, but if anything that's a benefit- free birth control. IVF + genetic modification of the egg cell, assuming your technology is that advanced, should be the easy solution.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#99

Post by tangue »

idlewords wrote: post #65

Pharmacology is an interesting example where better technology and scientific understanding have made things worse than earlier, low-tech methods ("inject plant extracts into animals and see what happens"). The number of new drugs discovered per dollar of research has been dropping since 1960, and obvious explanations (like "the easy ones have already been found") turn out not to explain the phenomenon. [ http://www.…

If this initiative funds studies on non-profitable treatments (fasting, nutrition) or counter balance industry backed lobbying, they will earn my respect. But if its to dump money on AI, yes its just sad. Google and Facebook AI can't fight the most basic spam. Seeing the same tools curing cancer even in the long run is a little bit far fetched ...

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#100

Post by goatlover »

kendallpark wrote: post #94
user731955373 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.

Which is a remarkable scientific achievement, independent of its use.

Remarkable in the same way a future gray goo invention would be. And it was a military initiative, developed for military reasons.
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