"AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

DNA sequencing has been following a Moore's Law style curve. It is cheap and easy now.

> > AI will develop a custom therapy

>

> This statement suggests you really don’t know what you’re talking about with regards to AI.

>

> AI doesn’t develop treatments magically. Work needs to be don’t to curate a dataset of treatments and diseases, BUT even then AI can’t create new treatments for existing untreatable cancer as we don’t have any data to go off of.

No one is suggesting it can. AI is very good at pattern-matching. There is a cookbook of techniques here:

1) Create a phage which is very good at injecting into a specific type of cell

2) Create antibodies which can latch onto a specific type of cell, virus, or cancer, so the immune system can attack them

3) Create a vaccine, which is much the same as the above

None of these are hard in of themselves. What is hard is that there isn't a virus called "AIDS" or "flu" or "cold," but a very, very large family of viruses. Ditto for cancer and bacteria. This is the exact type of pattern matching problem ML excels at. Curing a specific virus isn't hard; what's hard is because of all the variations. That kind of adaptation is exactly what ML excels at.

Once covid was sequenced, the actual creation of a vaccine took -- literally -- a couple of days (of work by the world's best scientists). What took much longer was validation, regulatory approval, getting manufacturing up, etc.

> You’re too cavalier in hand waving away the real work by saying things like “AI will do this. Ez. 2 years”

You're attacking a strawman here. Step zero of this process will be:

- Collect a dataset of bacteriophage DNA and of bacteria they're good at attacking (this is a massive undertaking)

- Something very similar with DNA and antigens (much of this exists / has been done, but was a huge undertaking; see "protein folding")

This is a few years in itself. That's when we can start to begin training an AI. There are many other similar-sized steps along the way. "AI will cure cancer" doesn't mean "AI will cure cancer tomorrow." However, I can see all the steps along the way, and no fundamental hurdles.

It's like the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project on day 1. Yes, it's a major undertaking, but there's every reason t believe it will work. That's exciting.

So far, aside from calling me an idiot, no one in this thread suggested where the flaw in the above lies (and none of the comments suggested the poster had any understanding to do so). I responded to your comment since it was closest.