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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

#141

Post by jmcgough »

mchusma wrote: post #102

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 incre…

> 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.

I work in the emergency department of a busy hospital. MRIs are pretty labor intensive to perform and take 15m to an hour. We are not going to get to a point where we are regularly scanning people with MRIs without clear symptoms of CVA etc. They require techs to run, you aren't going to remove much "expensive human labor" other than making initial radiology reads faster. The article makes the distinction that someone needs to decide to order those time-consuming, expensive scans, and that is where the point of failure is right now, in that we sometimes write patients off as delusional. AI can't help in situations where we have no data.

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

#142

Post by skepticATX »

idle_zealot wrote: post #72
mlinhares wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic or god. I’m at a point that if I can replace AI with magic/god in a phrase I know it’s bullshit.

The real test is to replace AI with "humanity, given 1000 years". If the statement is reasonable after replacement then it is possible. If it still sounds unlikely then it merits deeper inspection. Will humanity cure cancer given 1000 of study and medical development? It's quite possible, and AI will probably help. So it's not unreasonable to claim that AI can cure cancer (eventually).

> humanity, given 1000 years

The problem is that this makes almost anything sound reasonable, besides things that violate the laws of physics.

I don't think that thinking this far out is anything but pure speculation. Whether the mechanism is human intelligence, AI, or magic.

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

#143

Post by bugglebeetle »

xetplan wrote: post #115
bugglebeetle wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology is an amoral form of power that accrues to those who have access to it, as well as have the most access to it. In unequal societies, this accrual is to those who already have wealth, political power, etc. If the opposite was true, as you claim, the most technologically advanced countries would have seen decreasingly inequality in the period you fit. In reality, they’ve only seen the opposite.

It is because your view of inequality is bullshit. Your views are exactly in line with Khmer Rogue. Cambodia in 1977 was a much more equal society than America in 2024. Can't argue with that.

I have zero idea what you’re talking about. You seem to be in conversation with yourself.

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

#144

Post by ak217 »

gfodor wrote: post #85
matsemann wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is facts about how these systems hurt people leftist?

[flagged]

What you're saying is vague to the point of being malicious. You're poisoning discourse by labeling ideas as undesirable, but so broadly that you end up trying to smear the author instead.

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

#145

Post by xanderlewis »

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!

To the extent that machine learning models are a black box, it is ‘magic’.

Of course, at the lowest levels it’s entirely understood but it’s the emergent properties that give many the feeling of magic — and I would argue quite reasonably so.

…for people who use ‘magic’ to refer to things that accomplish complicated tasks whilst abstracting it all away so that it looks easy (much like how I can copy and paste between my iDevices on a LAN and it magically works), anyway.

> Of course magic can cure cancer because… it’s magic!

If you take magic to mean something supernatural, then yes. It’s essentially of the same form as ‘god is perfect; a god that exists is greater than a god that doesn’t; therefore god exists’-type arguments.

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

#146

Post by GuB-42 »

_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…

Also, for the French example, it actually has nothing to do with AI.

The problem was that the calculation for housing (not food) welfare benefits changed and the migration to the new software that came with it went poorly.

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

#147

Post by b20000 »

optimalsolver wrote: post #96
b20000 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

humans have imagination and creativity and other qualities …

Could you specify a set of tasks you believe AI won't be able to do?

IMHO AI will be able to generate solutions close to the best solution for a problem, with the remaining distance to be covered by humans.

the question is whether the cost of using AI to generate a solution, and then fixing it manually, will be lower, or higher, than building the solution using humans.

as we have seen before with wizards and other tools to generate solutions, the cost of fixing the solution is often times higher than it is to just build it from scratch manually.

also, as humans use AI more and more, there will be less and less material to use for training that is high quality, and AI will train on itself, leading to a rapid decline in quality of the output.

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

#148

Post by carbocation »

haldujai wrote: post #135
carbocation wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You said:

> Your comment misinterpreted this as “using the patients' symptoms and objective data” (when they only used objective data)

This represents an important misunderstanding of the methods of the paper. The model was trained using images (objective data) and the pain score (patients' symptoms). From the methods: "A convolutional neural network was trained to predict KOOS pain score for each knee using each X-ray image."

Also with respect to the author's claims, from the paper's abstract:

> Because algorithmic severity measures better capture underserved patients’ pain, and severity measures influence treatment decisions, algorithmic predictions could potentially redress disparities in access to treatments like arthroplasty.

You think I'm misinterpreting, but I still think that the paper is more important than you're giving credit.

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

#150

Post by thuuuomas »

renewiltord wrote: post #53

My dad’s an orthopaedic trauma surgeon. A friend was curious if his knee injury outcomes could be predicted from the radiologist’s report. So I supplied that plus X-rays and description of condition and situation that caused it to ChatGPT-4 (the early days version) to see if it would describe everything correctly and say what actions should be taken and then sent that to my dad for validation. He said it was spot on.…

> The patience and understanding of an LLM cannot be beaten.

Embarrassing. Hope somebody hugs you today.

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