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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

#51

Post by wizzwizz4 »

samatman wrote: post #37
incangold wrote: post #13

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…

> 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 received from the sun. Even if we solve that… deuterium, like oil, is non-renewable. Doesn't matter how cheap it is: there are only two dozen trillion tonnes of it in the ocean, and once we've run out, we've run out.

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

#53

Post by renewiltord »

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.

He then asked what it would say for the prognosis. Also again spot on.

So there’s things it can do well, for certain. I’m of the opinion that if we manage to scale this machine it will create novel science.

In any case, the two complaints expressed in the article ( inappropriate comprehension of patient problems and inequality) are both actually better with LLMs. The patience and understanding of an LLM cannot be beaten. Once we fix the context window, and once again unshackle this machine from ridiculous chains that safetyists have put it in, we will improve patient care.

Maybe they won't cure cancer, but a host of problems will be taken care of.

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

#56

Post by daniel_reetz »

Spooky23 wrote: post #49
mlyle wrote: post #26

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…

Cancer isn’t one thing and AI is an important tool that will accelerate treatment and drug development. 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 d…

Can you elaborate a little on what's new? Someone close to me had a melanoma scare on almost the same time frame, and had a lot of difficulty finding doctors who would take her seriously.

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

#57

Post by jhbadger »

Peregrine1 wrote: post #8

Was expecting a deep dive into cancer therapeutics and startups working in the space. This is not that. very misleading title given how diverse AI applications are in medicine.

Exactly. There's lots of things AI/ML is being used for in medicine besides image analysis for diagnostic purposes. It's helping laboratory researchers analyze their data and pick which hypotheses to investigate further, for example.

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

#58

Post by ummonk »

dartos wrote: post #43
frognumber wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> sequence it 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…

No, you're the one who doesn't understand AI. At this point AI has demonstrated ample capability to extrapolate to out of sample data.

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

#59

Post by mixdup »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #48
Nowado wrote: post #38

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…

yes. the amount we spend to keep people alive who have little to no hope of ever recovering is immense. of course it is cruel and leads to myriad bad outcomes if you were to even attempt to have a discussion about trying to change that (it is the slippery-est of slippery slopes)

there's probably no way to actually do anything concerted about it without turning society into Logan's Run but having gone through it with a grandparent and a parent, it is clear something is broken at the end of life

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

#60

Post by jcims »

yashap wrote: post #21

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,…

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 norm that a major children's hospital had no idea what to do with her. They admitted her because it was protocol but it was completely unnecessary and we had to explain how it happened at least ten times while we were there.

It was an eye opening experience.

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