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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

#131

Post by fnordpiglet »

jph00 wrote: post #105
_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…

Well, I think the preface leads with this statement, which does seem to indicate a fundamental bias in the thesis that’s overly political:

Second, AI is used to disproportionately benefit the privileged while worsening inequality.

The article talks a lot about the challenges of care delivery and how there appears to be systemic breakdowns in how patients are listened to and how demographics seems to lead to worse outcomes. These are all serious issues. It further states essentially that AI, at least learning based AI, learns what it is trained with and most training data indirectly encodes the various social biases that influence the data collection or what is collected in the data. The is true too.

However neither of these have to do with AI curing cancer. They seem more statements that AI won’t solve all social ills, which is absolutely true. But these don’t speak to given a positive cancer diagnosis can AI provide a route to curing an individuals cancer. I suspect the answer is “maybe,” but none of the social and political points made are why. It’s because cancer is very complex and we need a vector that AI can generate some solution in to treat any specific cancer. Since there are many many types of cancer and many many variants of those types, as well as per individual cancer genetic variability, it seems unlikely “AI will cure cancer,” but I think it’s very likely AI will make cancer treatment much more personalized, discover many new therapeutic agents, and accelerate human driven research. It is already used in generic immunotherapy, mRNA design, and other treatments. As tools and techniques become better, as well as our understanding of how to apply it, AI will help a lot.

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

#132

Post by wccrawford »

supergirl wrote: post #23

when people say AI will cure cancer they mean AI will find some novel idea that no-one tought about. the article is more about how AI will fail at medical practice.

Or merely that it'll be used to accelerate what we can already do to the point that it's revolutionary. Other computer advances have done the same, like the ability to finally create Folding@Home at a level that it'd matter.

It's easy to say "X will do Y" when X is a force multiplier for things we already do.

The fact that it could also come up with new ideas is a bonus on top of that, making it even easier to say.

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

#133

Post by tbrownaw »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #51
samatman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change is easy to solve: build fusion reactors which are 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar. Deuterium is cheap, after all. > Climate change is not currently being solved because of politics and existing systems, not because of a lack of intelligence. It's a technical problem that's sociopolitical because we don't have a Pareto-improving technology to solve it with. Like 50x fusion reactors. Not a comple…

> Climate change is easy to solve: build fusion reactors which are 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar. That just kicks the can down the road. If our general strategy (aim for exponential growth in all things) remains the same, cheaper power will mean we use more of it. Even if we completely phase out CO₂-releasing energy sources, the waste heat of our industrial processes would eventually dominate the power rece…

At some point the sun is supposed to go red giant and eat the earth. Anything that can last at least that long is effectively unlimited.

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

#134

Post by vidarh »

haldujai wrote: post #108
yashap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

The harm can be from the initial screening too. The lifetime risk for complications from routine colonoscopy is around 1.6%. The lifetime risk of colo-rectal cancer is 4-5%.

So already before investigating the result, there's a very real consideration whether increasing the number of colonoscopies is likely to be a net benefit.

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

#135

Post by haldujai »

carbocation wrote: post #122
haldujai wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The explainability/methodology is lauded.

Not sure what a letter to the editor would accomplish. The nature paper only interpreted radiographs and the only claim of the authors was basically that the model is a better predictor of pain than KLG.

Your comment misinterpreted this as “using the patients' symptoms and objective data” (when they only used objective data) and added “may actually outperform current medical standards” which was not the claim as current medical standards already consider patient symptoms in addition to objective data, as stated in the article reference to the TKA guideline.

When I report a joint xray I’m not assessing the patient’s pain level, they can be asked that.

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

#136

Post by vidarh »

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.

It is a fundamentally bad idea to do without very specific understanding of the risks. E.g. many programs intended to expand mass screening for breast cancer were reconsidered after it became clear that it was not a given that they would provide a net benefit, because it takes a very low level of risk from screenings and subsequent follow-ups before mass screening becomes harmful when applied to groups where it is likely to save many lives.

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

#137

Post by vidarh »

dale_glass wrote: post #117
RandomLensman wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't we intelligently limit that to things with essentially no risk of false positive?

The problem with that is that even "essentially no risk of false positives" starts adding up when you do millions of tests every year.

If those tests are done on demographics where the chance of a true positive is also very low and the difference in risk profile between catching it during such screening vs. waiting until the patient discovers it is not very significant, it can take a very low rate of complications before it becomes a problem.

But, yes, we do limit that, and that is a major reason there are very few mass screening programs.

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

#138

Post by striking »

_xerces_ wrote: post #123
matsemann wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inequa…

I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing these issues out, even if you think AI is merely an accelerant of existing social issues. And it's not necessarily a question of how left you are to believe so. Ultimately what's important is the outcome, and if the outcome is an increase in marginalization, then I think something should be done. Stopping AI is probably suboptimal but the alternative that preserves the rights of the marginalized is getting everyone to agree that society should be more fair, and in that context can you really blame people for espousing a belief they find more actionable or practical?

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

#139

Post by haldujai »

vidarh wrote: post #134
haldujai wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bu…

The harm can be from the initial screening too. The lifetime risk for complications from routine colonoscopy is around 1.6%. The lifetime risk of colo-rectal cancer is 4-5%. So already before investigating the result, there's a very real consideration whether increasing the number of colonoscopies is likely to be a net benefit.

Colonoscopy is confusing because it is both screening and diagnostic/investigating.

Most if not all of the complication/risk (perforation and major bleeding being the ones of note) is from the polypectomy / biopsy part of the colonoscopy.

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