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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

#151

Post by ak217 »

randcraw wrote: post #97

The article completely misses the essential mechanism behind the advancement of science, like cures for disease. Advancing science is not about making better use of the info you have. It's about gathering NEW info you didn't have before and then using it to propose a novel mechanism of action or a hypothesis leading to a better theory. But AI cannot gather new info. Only better sensors can do that. Without gathering…

First, this article is about medicine, not science, so I'm not sure that the critique is well targeted.

Your critique might apply to an article written about the use of AI/ML in science, in which case it would be uninformed - algorithms like DeepVariant, DeepConsensus, and AlphaFold are fundamental AI-enabled tools for gathering and interpreting new information from existing sensors that changed the state of the art and are advancing science and enabling cures today. AI-enabled tools are also improving information management and literature search for scientists, because advancing science usually is about making better use of the info you have - a lot of scientific breakthroughs today are made by analyzing data that has already been gathered (like Genbank or UK Biobank or All of Us data).

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

#152

Post by renewiltord »

thuuuomas wrote: post #150
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.

This is a really low quality comment, dude. Do better.

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

#153

Post by idopmstuff »

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…

Yeah, I was kind of baffled by this - she starts by talking about the problems with automated systems, but when she gets to the part about the medical system she starts with the example of human doctors not listening to their patient. Not to say AI is inherently better than humans in this kind of situation, but it's very strange to make the case that AI in medicine is bad because human doctors have bias.

I expected the article to be about how people misunderstand the difference between knowledge and intelligence. No matter how smart AI is, it can't just magically invent a cure for cancer - it has to gather the knowledge of how things interact and what effects drugs have.

Still, AI does have lots of potential to improve things there. My wife is a Research Associate in a biotech startup, and she could basically be replaced by humanoid robots to run experiments (probably don't even have to go that far - there are cloud labs already) and AI to run analysis. The analysis will be much faster and the robots can work 24/7, so you could really increase throughput of experimentation.

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

#154

Post by unsupp0rted »

RandomLensman wrote: post #92
yashap wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but my understanding is that for many types of cancer, detecting that specific cancer early does make a big difference. It can be the difference between a single, minimally invasive surgery to remove a tiny rumour that hasn’t spread, that can be effective even without chemo/radiation/etc., and stage 4 cancer that has spread a tonne where even with extensive chemo/radiation/etc., your chances aren’t good.

How frequently do you want to screen? Monthly? Weekly? Some also have no known effective treatment - maybe some super early detection helps, but maybe not.

Annual full body MRI would be good

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

#155

Post by hobom »

jph00 wrote: post #101
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 inclu…

Like the OP, I also greatly respect the work Rachel and you did for AI.

Nevertheless, I can't help but think that you are seeing this issue to negatively.

"The point of the article is that AI as a research tool is insufficient to result in improvements to patient outcomes on its own." This seems unlikely if you consider this question as-is. Past technological improvements has made healthcare better overall without requiring societal changes necessarily. Take mRNA vaccines, a technology that has improved Covid-19 outcomes tremendously. Sure, certain groups have less access than other groups, but surely even marginalized groups are better off overall because of the existence of these vaccines. Health is not a zero-sum game.

And I think this negative attitude also misses the potential of AI by default. Yeah it sucks that not everyone gets MRI access, but those that do will benefit, including marginalized groups. I guess it feels wrong to some people to express a positive sentiment at an unjust state of affairs, but improved diagnosis and treatments translate into lives saved.

You also have to compare AI to the status quo. Sure, AI will have biases, but so do humans (as Rachel points out!) and the decisive question is whether AI has less biases (similarly to how safety of self driving cars is judged). With AI you at least have a chance of analyzing the decision making, and making it objective. We should be extremely excited about this possibility!

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

#156

Post by jdthedisciple »

jph00 wrote: post #101
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 inclu…

> The article includes, for instance, the example that better MRI interpretation doesn't help those people that are being refused an MRI.

Aren't those two entirely orthogonal issues though?

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

#157

Post by RandomLensman »

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?

Then the selection of tests might get very small and we simply don't even know what all might be relevant if doing billions and billions of tests on a lot things - a lot of possible weird things to trip us up.

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

#158

Post by jdthedisciple »

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.

Spot on, the true agenda behind this became entirely obvious to me right after reading that sentence.

Otherwise also a mediocre, rather incoherent piece especially for someone with a PhD.

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

#160

Post by bitwize »

AI (as we talk about it today) is statistics.

Better statistical models will help us identify diseases, and maybe molecules we can use to fight those diseases.

But "AI" is not magic sauce you can slather on to a problem to get a solution. It's going to take statistics-savvy medical professionals, and medicine-savvy data professionals, working together. We've complicated things to bring solutions within reach that might've not been within reach before, so we're going to have to be smarter about how we apply these new tools.

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