41–50 of 207 posts
I am sure generative ai will be able to cure cancer after humans figure it out then post it to the internet.
Saying you'll cure cancer with AI without specifying the type of cancer is like declaring you'll solve crime with Batman. Way too broad to be useful, but makes a good headline.
I kind of feel like that's exactly why AI is helpful here: - Grab a cancer (or virus, bacteria, etc.) - Sequence it - AI will develop a custom therapy for that cancer In broad strokes, it's not hard to develop a therapy for any specific cancer or other disease in a specific individual. There are several broad strategies: - A targeted, custom phage to kill a bacteria (or extrapolate to killing a type of cells) - A cus…
How? You’re hiding a ton of complicated work in these 2 words
> 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.
At that point, a team of doctors might as well analyze the data themselves (probably using a more specific kind of ML technique)
You’re too cavalier in hand waving away the real work by saying things like “AI will do this. Ez. 2 years”
Here's an example of youtuber [0] who got helped by Ada[1] which suggested she might have endo given her description of symptoms which countless doctors failed to narrow down.
[0] This calculation tells you your chances of being sick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzA9VATcZhY
[1] https://ada.com/
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!
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also share the author’s concerns. I keep coming back to the fact that if you asked even GPT 3 how to solve climate change, it would give you a perfectly good answer. We have this idea that AI will “solve climate change” at some point in the future. What we really mean is “give us a different answer to climate change that has zero cost”. Climate change is not currently being solved because of politics and existing s…
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…
IMO, pretty much magic wishful thinking.
I'm enthusiastic about AI. But it's not magic. The main problem here is as Feynmann said, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled".
In this case the problem is that a fusion reactor is a real, physical machine intensely dependent on the real world in a million ways. From the actual physics of fusion, to manufacturing capabilities, to the capabilities of the various sensors, actuators, processors, etc needed to control the reaction.
You can't magic that up with AI. There's no way for it to figure out that we're subtly wrong about some fact about fusion and that we can get 100X better by just doing things differently. A hypothetical GPT20 would still need to actually perform real physical experiments to gain such knowledge, because it'd be nowhere in our books or the internet for it to ingest it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early This is, to some extent, misleading. I mean, earlier treatment is beneficial, but there's a significant confound. All else being equal, if a cancer is less aggressive and slowly growing it is more likely to be detected early. Put in other terms, the cancers detected earlier by screening are a very different popul…
There is even more fun aspect. 'Survival' for cancer tends to be defined as surviving 5 years. The earlier you catch, the more patient had left to live anyway.
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 nothing, ie. almost performative.
Is this true?
I do think AI has a chance to make healthcare, for cancer and other diseases, a lot more proactive. Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early, we do essentially nothing to catch it early. My understanding is that this is because: 1. Administering regular MRIs, blood panels, etc. is expensive, in terms of the initial data collection 2. It’s also expensive,…
> Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early This is, to some extent, misleading. I mean, earlier treatment is beneficial, but there's a significant confound. All else being equal, if a cancer is less aggressive and slowly growing it is more likely to be detected early. Put in other terms, the cancers detected earlier by screening are a very different popul…
My late wife detected a mole that was melanoma in 2019. She was within months of being cleared for observation in 2023 when two brain tumors were detected. Despite the best of care, she was gone in 6 months.
If her initial treatment had been in 2024 instead of 2019, it’s 80% likely she would be around for another decade or more. That’s how fast new treatment options are coming to market, and data analysis with AI and other tech is improving it. New trials are using platforms like Moderna to provide custom vaccines that should reduce treatment side effects.
While the hyperbole of the media is annoying, the impacts of new tech to identify genetic vulnerabilities in cancers is near miraculous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is even more fun aspect. 'Survival' for cancer tends to be defined as surviving 5 years. The earlier you catch, the more patient had left to live anyway.
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…