Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for that. I'd argue that the numbers suggest that venture spend on info tech / AI / social media is at least of the same order of magnitude as new drug discovery, if not more. It would be interesting to compare blockbuster drugs of the past 5--10 years or so to see what types of investment have been made there. mRNA / Covid19 vaccines, and GLP1s. A Deloitte report gives oncology, infectious disease, and chroni…
> at least of the same order of magnitude as new drug discovery That’s a valid way of looking at things, but diminishing returns tells a different story. People have been looking at treating the same disease with 100’s of billions / year across decades. What completely new ideas haven’t been explored with the 10’s of trillions of dollars we already spent? Vs deep learning or perhaps more narrowly LLM style AI where t…
Increases in healthcare spending have had remarkably little outcomes improvement. And that's been the case for a long, long, time, 50--60 years by some arguments. Robert Gordon made a strong case for this in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016), citing the work of healthcare economists, notably Victor Fuchs.
But ...
... "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics", as Robert Solow stated. Computer capabilities have increased roughly 33 millions-fold since the 1950s, but productivity hasn't followed that same curve. Even looking at information technology spend vs. growth shows limited gains (computer capacity has become vastly cheaper over the same period). It seems likely that AI will follow a similar trend.
The one technological domain in which there was a near-linear relationship between increased input and output was mechanisation. Going back to Gordon, two of the most interesting plots in the book were of horsepower and kW per worker vs. output. The relationship wasn't quite 1:1, but it was strongly linear, in that an n-fold increase in input power provided a k*n increase in output (with k Back to medicine, two of the most remarkable areas of improvement in the past decade have been mRNA vaccines and GLP1s. Granted the latter are an older technology (by several decades), but improvements permitting once-per-week dosing and oral dosing, rather than daily injections, have dramatically increased availability of GLP1s, and their benefits across a huge range of conditions are remarkable. Probably not so much as general hygiene, sanitation, and safety improvements from say 1850 -- 1925, which saw the most remarkable reductions in human mortality. But respectable all the same. Given the growing threat of novel infectious disease, mRNA vaccine development within days of an outbreak's announcement is absolutely stunning. I'll tip my hat to health research there, and note that fundamental research in both cases languished until quite recently.