Ai will cure our need for looking for magic beans… or in a few thousand years we will have a dune like war with the ai .
"AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
91–100 of 207 posts
Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#92Earlier 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…
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.
Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#93I dislike these articles that end up being written with a leftist bias that AI is already being used to [purposely] control and marginalize people. There are definite inequalities in society including in medicine and these biases I am sure make it into training data. However, while we should be watchful, I don't think there is a conscious decision by "the man" to purposely put certain groups down using AI. AI researc…
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Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#94I 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 humans aren’t capable of is undeniable.
Footnote: I think the context of her thinking is very much around the categorization and management of patients, which doesn’t necessarily relate to “AI will cure cancer”.
Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#95Earlier 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…
I don’t know about that, speaking to oncology as I work in a NCI designated cancer center (i.e. somewhere that spends dizzying amounts) and it skews younger than you might think these days.
I’m not sure what you mean by “very, very few years”. As a hypothetical would prolonging life for ~3-7 years in a 40-50 year old be considered “almost performative” to you?
“Good old medical care” often means 3-6 month survival for these patients.
Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#96Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#97The 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 better info, even an infinite increase in smarts can't move the needle in science.
If the info you need lies in genomics but all you have is images, no amount of cognition can bridge that gap.
AI has seen some success in detecting disease (diagnosis) but none at all in creating new treatments or cures. Future use of AI likely can help guide or optimize an existing therapy (e.g. chemotherapy) by detecting or discriminating feedback faster than a human can. But invention or discovery? No. AI as we know it today has shown no ability to advance the knowledge frontier beyond what the facts fed in by its teacher, nor any signs it ever will.
Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#98I dislike these articles that end up being written with a leftist bias that AI is already being used to [purposely] control and marginalize people. There are definite inequalities in society including in medicine and these biases I am sure make it into training data. However, while we should be watchful, I don't think there is a conscious decision by "the man" to purposely put certain groups down using AI. AI researc…
Whether is a conscious decision by authorities is orthogonal to the point, it arguably even supports the article.
Good intentions with bad outcomes are still bad outcomes. Ignoring the trends is to ignore those marginalized by them even more.
Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#99Re: "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
#100The 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…
Science is also about finding new/different ways to understand the world from existing data (e.g., new theories might describe existing data better).