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"AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

rachel.fast.ai

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

#101

Post by jph00 »

mmaunder wrote: post #94

I have the utmost respect for the work that Jeremy and team and Fast.ai have accomplished but in this post Rachel is railing against the free market, bugs in software and preexisting biases in humans to create an incredibly cynical and unrelated cocktail. There are many things broken about our world. We should work hard to fix them. But the promise of AI as a research tool to create the kinds of breakthroughs that hu…

Rachel and I are well aware of the promise of AI as a research tool. I created the first company that focussed on deep learning in medicine. Rachel has a PhD in math and is now doing a masters in immunology, and is trying to help figure out to bring AI to medical research.

The point of the article is that AI as a research tool is insufficient to result in improvements to patient outcomes on its own. The article includes, for instance, the example that better MRI interpretation doesn't help those people that are being refused an MRI.

Rachel and I quit our jobs and spent years, entirely for free, helping make AI more accessible to more people. We did that because we think AI is great! Pointing out that helping patients requires more than just AI is not anti-tech, it's pro-human.

We can care about both the technology and the context in which it operates.

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

#102

Post by mchusma »

If I understand the article, it’s that if you keep everything the same and simply replace ai for human doctors, then you won’t have better outcomes. Basically, you sometimes need multiple diagnostics and actually need to get scans and medical imagery to detect issues. These are all directly improved by AI. AI should make diagnosis cheaper and more effective, with less bias. MRIs should cost 1/10th as much as we increase the throughput of machines with AI (as several people are working on) and reduce the need for expensive human labor.

It’s the lowering of cost that feels like the revolution in healthcare. AI should enable nearly free ways of mining noisy signals in the body could catch issues. Smart toilets, mirrors, scans, etc. all help.

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

#103

Post by tomNth »

b20000 wrote: post #84
tomNth wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And true intelligence can get data they don't have ? true intelligence isn't magic.

humans have imagination and creativity and other qualities …

And those aren't sophisticated interpolation ?

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

#104

Post by RandomLensman »

yashap wrote: post #77
jcims wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We found out about my daughter's type 1 diabetes purely by accident. I found a blood glucose test kit doing some spring cleaning and asked the family to gather around to check our sugar. It was really just a joke but I thought it would be fun. Queue three results around 100 and one at 270. We tested again the next day and it was 290. Finding type 1 diabetes this way in a young teenager was so absolutely out of the no…

Yeah that’s wild! I do think proactive medical screening is something most medical systems have mostly given up on, other than in very targeted ways, for very specific diseases in very specific high risk populations. But I don’t think this is because it’s a fundamentally bad idea, I think it’s more that it’s impractical right now. It does seem to me that AI has a chance to make it practical.

If you screen a lot of people for a lot of things, you will find a lot of things, but not all the findings will mean something or require action. The initial ramp up of huge "unwarranted" screenings will create a lot of pain until we/AI figures out when something warrants attention.

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

#105

Post by jph00 »

_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…

There is only a single mention of anything even vaguely like what you're reacting to, which is the specific claim of an "intentionally faulty calculation as part of the computational RoboDebt program" in Australia. To jump from this specific (and AFAIK correct) claim to a "conscious decision by "the man" to purposely put certain groups down using AI" seems like quite a leap.

The article largely deals with unfortunate side effects of a combination of feedback loops, implicit bias, economics, and lack of technical understanding in the broader community -- quite the opposite of any "conscious decision".

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

#108

Post by haldujai »

yashap wrote: post #71
pheewma wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also downstream consequences of ordering tests aside from cost; not all tests are harmless. As an example, regular screening for prostate cancer isn't recommended as much. Partially because it is often so slow-growing that people often die of other causes before the cancer even begins to cancer, and because the definitive test is a biopsy which is somewhat invasive. Rates of complications are relatively low…

Sure, of course you would make practical decisions about what kinds of tests to administer, and not proactively administer the tests that have significant negative side effects. For the other point, personally I don’t really buy the argument of “it’s better not to know you have cancer X, because it might end up being low impact.” If we had excellent regular screening, yes detection of low impact cancers would become…

> Sure, of course you would make practical decisions about what kinds of tests to administer, and not proactively administer the tests that have significant negative side effects.

The harm is from investigating the screening test result and not the test itself.

> If it became a common thing for cancers to be detected, but the detection could reliably say “this is likely low impact, we should just keep an eye on it but not treat it”, this would be a lot less scary

This is already the case for some like prostate cancer and certain lymphomas.

> Cancer diagnoses are partly so scary right now because we’re often mostly catching cancers that have progressed and are causing symptoms

The most aggressive cancers are also the least likely ones to be diagnosed by screening due to growth rates, screening intervals and diagnostic test limitations.

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

#109

Post by inglor_cz »

Spooky23 wrote: post #50
MyFirstSass wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably hyperbole but a colleague told me about a 80/20 distribution, that a decreasing amounts are spent on substantial life extension or quality of life improvement in the west as the pop ages. The basic good old medical care invented 100 years ago, while dizzying amounts are spent on prolonging lives for very, very few years, often very late in life - efforts that are very close to - in effect to have done nothin…

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, she gained almost a fifth of her life by that single operation performed when she was already old.

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

#110

Post by jph00 »

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.

> we expect AI to get there first because it's denser and can be replicated orders of magnitude more quickly and cheaply

There is no evidence that AI that's useful enough to help make research breakthroughs can be replicated orders of magnitude more quickly and cheaply. Whilst that's a true fact about software, AI is not just software -- it requires a lot of hardware. And currently it's far less efficient at using that hardware for general purpose problem solving than humans are.

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