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"AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

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Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#121

Post by ben_w »

b20000 wrote: post #32

i am puzzled why people think there is true intelligence in AI. IMHO it is advanced interpolation or morphing similar to the photo morphing tools of the 90s. if the data is not in the model you can’t get it out. you can only get interpolations out of it of data in the model. the more sophisticated the interpolation the more people think there is intelligence. maybe i am missing something but this is what i perceive.

> if the data is not in the model you can’t get it out

That's trivially also true for humans, you can't get out of your brain something that isn't in it.

If you meant "external training set", then it's false for both AI and humans, as demonstrated by e.g. AlphaZero getting superhuman performance despite zero examples of human games of Go or Chess.

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#122

Post by carbocation »

haldujai wrote: post #67
carbocation wrote: post #2

One related publication that I thought would have fit well into the comment about disparate pain treatment is this[1] from Ziad Obermeyer's group. They found that when they trained a model using patient pain and knee X-rays, much of the disparity in symptoms could be accounted for by findings from the X-rays themselves. It's a nice example of where using the patients' symptoms and objective data may actually outperfo…

> It's a nice example of where using the patients' symptoms and objective data may actually outperform current medical standards I think you’re jumping the gun here, this paper was a hot topic when it was published. Patient symptoms combined with objective data is already the medical standard. Note that: 1. KLG is not a measure of pain but of OA radiographic severity. 2. KLG 3-4 is not a prerequisite for surgery. Fro…

I'm not a radiologist so I could well be overinterpreting. However, if so, I am not sure that I am alone. This study published in Nature Medicine was hailed by radiologists as one of the "notable successes in using explainability methods to aid in the discovery of knowledge" [1].

Your sober assessment seems valuable, and would make for an interesting letter to the editor.

1 = https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7...

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#123

Post by _xerces_ »

matsemann wrote: post #74
_xerces_ wrote: post #62

I dislike these articles that end up being written with a leftist bias that AI is already being used to [purposely] control and marginalize people. There are definite inequalities in society including in medicine and these biases I am sure make it into training data. However, while we should be watchful, I don't think there is a conscious decision by "the man" to purposely put certain groups down using AI. AI researc…

Why is facts about how these systems hurt people leftist?

Just a few snippets that use language typically used by those on the further left with a bit of an agenda. I am kind of center-left myself, so I agree with some of the sentiment, but I tend to think that a lot of the issues they ascribe to purposeful, scheming evil actors are often just defects in how our society works on a macro scale.

- "AI is used to disproportionately benefit the privileged while worsening inequality"

- "the goal is to increase corporate and government revenues by denying poor people resources"

- “It is a pattern throughout history that surveillance is used against those considered ‘less than’, against the poor man, the person of color, the immigrant, the heretic. It is used to try to stop marginalized people from achieving power.”

- The same pattern is found in the role of technology in decision systems.

- "The goal of many automated decision systems is to increase revenues for governments and private companies"

- "here is already a clear pattern in which AI is used to centralize power and harm the marginalized."

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#124

Post by missedthecue »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #30
skepticATX wrote: post #10

The predominate view of AI is that it is essentially magic. Which of course couldn’t be further from the truth. But I find these arguments much easier to understand if you look at it through that lens. Of course magic can cure cancer because… it’s magic!

"AI will cure X" is equivalent to "Human intelligence will cure X", except that we expect AI to get there first because it's denser and can be replicated orders of magnitude more quickly and cheaply. You can levy a couple of counterpoints- that humans will never cure cancer either or that this kind of AI is impossible- but those are magical pessimism moreso than the alternative is magical optimism.

Some things AI will probably just do better, even if there aren't any paradigm-shifting breakthroughs with cures and medicines.

For example, reading an MRI or other medical scan correctly goes a long way toward curing cancer. Reading it incorrectly wastes precious time as problems are ignored or mistreated with the wrong methods. I knew someone whose bone cancer was mistreated as a rotator cuff injury for a little over a year due to the fact that an inexperienced and probably overworked doctor did not correctly identify it in the slew of tests and scans the patient had taken.

In the future, it is likely that AI will always read these scans and test results more accurately than a human physician, leading to higher remission success rates. This will happen fairly quietly and behind the scenes, even if AI doesn't invent the magic cancer pill.

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#125

Post by Spooky23 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #109
Spooky23 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. Look at the people in the hospital - they’re old. Inpatient costs are astronomical, and seniors with poor social supports end up hospitalized at great expense with issues where root cause are easily prevented… like dehydration.

Being old is a fairly long part of life nowadays. Old is not the same as hopeless or almost dying. My grandma had a melanoma at the age of 74, which is "old" by most human standards. It was located on her earlobe and an operation helped her get rid of it. She then lived to be 90, most of that extra time either fully or partially self-sufficient. Only in the last months in her life she really deteriorated. Basically,…

That’s awesome. I’m not suggesting that older folks not get care.

But because of way our system works, we’ll happily pay $300k to hospitalize an otherwise healthy 70 year old who is dehydrated and develops serious problems that could be solved by an aide or helper that would cost $20-30k.

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#126

Post by [deleted] »

yashap wrote: post #21

I do think AI has a chance to make healthcare, for cancer and other diseases, a lot more proactive. Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early, we do essentially nothing to catch it early. My understanding is that this is because: 1. Administering regular MRIs, blood panels, etc. is expensive, in terms of the initial data collection 2. It’s also expensive,…

[deleted]

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#127

Post by [deleted] »

tim333 wrote: post #120
htk wrote: post #106

"There is already a clear pattern in which AI is used to centralize power and harm the marginalized." Too bad this was in the last paragraph or so, it could've spared me from reading the rest if it was in the beginning.

In fairness "AI is used to disproportionately benefit the privileged while worsening inequality" was near the beginning. Not the best article really.

[deleted]

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#128

Post by tbrownaw »

_xerces_ wrote: post #62

I dislike these articles that end up being written with a leftist bias that AI is already being used to [purposely] control and marginalize people. There are definite inequalities in society including in medicine and these biases I am sure make it into training data. However, while we should be watchful, I don't think there is a conscious decision by "the man" to purposely put certain groups down using AI. AI researc…

> leftist bias that AI is already being used to [purposely] control and marginalize people

The recent Google Gemini image fiasco seems like a rather solid example of this being real.

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#129

Post by rain_iwakura »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #99
gfodor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don’t know what you could be saying other than that caring about poor people or welfare recipients is a leftist meme. That was pretty much all of the “leftism” in this article.

The fact that the poster focuses on the term ("leftism") rather than on the substance is itself a red flag imo. It puts the discussion on a weird tripolar spectrum: you're either leftist, centrist, or rightwing (of which the poster is likely to posit themselves as a center, to avoid being called biased). I don't think it's terribly productive, and unless the article was calling for Bolshevik Revolution, I don't mind a certain bias. The fallacy here is that it's possible to come in with objective lens--it isn't.

Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

#130

Post by [deleted] »

_xerces_ wrote: post #62

I dislike these articles that end up being written with a leftist bias that AI is already being used to [purposely] control and marginalize people. There are definite inequalities in society including in medicine and these biases I am sure make it into training data. However, while we should be watchful, I don't think there is a conscious decision by "the man" to purposely put certain groups down using AI. AI researc…

[deleted]
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