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"AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
- carbocation 3y agoOne related publication that I thought would have fit well into the comment about disparate pain treatment is this[1] from Ziad Obermeyer's group. They found that when they trained a model using patient pain and knee X-rays, much of the disparity in symptoms could be accounted for by findings from the X-rays themselves. It's a nice example of where using the patients' symptoms and objective data may actually outperform current medical standards, which fits with her participatory comments in the final paragraph. 1 = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01192-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01192-7
- haldujai 3y ago> It's a nice example of where using the patients' symptoms and objective data may actually outperform current medical standards I think you’re jumping the gun here, this paper was a hot topic when it was published. Patient symptoms combined with objective data is already the medical standard. Note that: 1. KLG is not a measure of pain but of OA radiographic severity. 2. KLG 3-4 is not a prerequisite for surgery. From the article: > While radiographic severity is not part of the formal guideline in allocations for arthroplasty (which only requires evidence of radiographic damage), empirically, patients with higher KLGs are more likely to receive surgery. TKA patients skew to higher grade for many reasons, one being that studies have shown KLG 2 patients who undergo TKA are more likely to experience dissatisfaction (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8344222/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8344222/). There are a lot of “ifs” in this paper which did not examine whether KLG 1-2 but ALG-P 3-4 patients benefit from TKA over conservative mgmt or other surgical interventions. It’s also unclear whether this better selects patients for TKA than KLG 1-2 + pain scores and other clinical variables. All this shows is that KLG is a poor correlate for pain, which is known and not what the score is designed/used for.
- carbocation 3y agoI'm not a radiologist so I could well be overinterpreting. However, if so, I am not sure that I am alone. This study published in Nature Medicine was hailed by radiologists as one of the "notable successes in using explainability methods to aid in the discovery of knowledge" [1]. Your sober assessment seems valuable, and would make for an interesting letter to the editor. 1 = https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(21)00208-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7...
- haldujai 3y agoThe explainability/methodology is lauded. Not sure what a letter to the editor would accomplish. The nature paper only interpreted radiographs and the only claim of the authors was basically that the model is a better predictor of pain than KLG. Your comment misinterpreted this as “using the patients' symptoms and objective data” (when they only used objective data) and added “may actually outperform current medical standards” which was not the claim as current medical standards already consider patient symptoms in addition to objective data, as stated in the article reference to the TKA guideline. When I report a joint xray I’m not assessing the patient’s pain level, they can be asked that.
- carbocation 3y agoYou said: > Your comment misinterpreted this as “using the patients' symptoms and objective data” (when they only used objective data) This represents an important misunderstanding of the methods of the paper. The model was trained using images (objective data) and the pain score (patients' symptoms). From the methods: "A convolutional neural network was trained to predict KOOS pain score for each knee using each X-ray image." Also with respect to the author's claims, from the paper's abstract: > Because algorithmic severity measures better capture underserved patients’ pain, and severity measures influence treatment decisions, algorithmic predictions could potentially redress disparities in access to treatments like arthroplasty. You think I'm misinterpreting, but I still think that the paper is more important than you're giving credit.
- patrickhogan1 3y agoSaying 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.
- highwaylights 3y agoAlso saying “AI will cure cancer” is like saying “our children will solve climate change”. I mean on the surface it seems like the answer is “yeah, probably”, but you’re saying nothing of how exactly.
- maerF0x0 3y agoI'm curious about the presumed language. When we say "She has cancer" we mean "a cancer". (Hopefully she doesn't have all of them!). Why couldn't the sentence "AI will cure cancer" mean "a cancer" as well?
- Ensorceled 3y ago"She has cancer" is a specific event, so we logically deduce that it is "a type of cancer". When you say "AI will cure cancer" that is not a singular event, so you assume cancer in the plural. You would have to say "AI will cure some forms of cancer" if you didn't mean the plural here.
- frognumber 3y agoI 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 custom vaccine to make your body make antibodies specific to a disease - And so on.... This is a ≈2 year research effort to do in each case, and perhaps a ≈10 year validation effort, not to mention regulatory. By that point, the patient is dead, or AIDS has mutated a few dozen times, and regardless, you need a massive research team to do so. And to do so, you've spent many million dollars on a research team that whole time. "AI will cure [X]" consists of AI doing the same thing instantly. I go to a doctor. My chronic disease is sequenced. My specific immune system is encouraged to attack that specific disease. I'm cured. (And yes, we each have a very different immune system; see MHC for an example of how and why)
- realharo 3y agoThe article, while talking about some very real problems, seems to be completely unrelated to the question of whether or not AI is likely to have that capability in the near/mid future (which is what the title implies).
- bugglebeetle 3y agoNo, the article discusses how “AI” and other machine learning and algorithmic systems are used in practice - to surveil, dispossess, and harm those in whomever the powerful deem as out groups, and how this is done under the guise of idealist appeals about mass benefit, akin to “curing cancer.”
- sxp 3y agoSaying "AI will cure cancer" is like saying "science will cure cancer" or "doctors will cure cancer". In general, all three statements are true about technological progress. > Second, AI is used to disproportionately benefit the privileged while worsening inequality. That's bullshit. Computers and other gadgets always start out as toys of the rich, but they quickly trickle down to everyone else. Compare the multi-thousand dollar cell phone of the 80s use by the rich to the multi-dollar cell phones of today used by billions. I don't mind if billionaires spend their money on AI now so that the R&D results in cheap AI in a decade that can be used by everyone. The author also goes and lists people harmed by computer problems without provide a benchmark of the number of people similarly harmed by human problems.
- maerF0x0 3y ago> Computers and other gadgets always start out as toys of the rich But is this a function of moore's law? I have to say that OpenAI's training costs seems to be growing exponentially, not declining exponentially.
- qgin 3y agoOpen source models seem to be lagging by about a year. But for the end user with a powerful enough computer, you can do GPT 3.5 level work for no additional cost right now.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoTechnology is an amoral form of power that accrues to those who have access to it, as well as have the most access to it. In unequal societies, this accrual is to those who already have wealth, political power, etc. If the opposite was true, as you claim, the most technologically advanced countries would have seen decreasingly inequality in the period you fit. In reality, they’ve only seen the opposite.
- xetplan 3y agoIt is because your view of inequality is bullshit. Your views are exactly in line with Khmer Rogue. Cambodia in 1977 was a much more equal society than America in 2024. Can't argue with that.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago[flagged]
- Peregrine1 3y agoWas 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.
- jhbadger 3y agoExactly. 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.
- incangold 3y agoSad to hear of Ilene Ruhoy’s experience here. She is a wonderful clinician who has enormously helped other patients with complex diagnostic paths and with diagnoses that are severely neglected.
- incangold 3y agoI 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 systems, not because of a lack of intelligence. There are so many similar situations in medicine. Intelligence is not enough- you also need a system capable of acting with that intelligence. AI could be transformational, but not without systemic change to support it.
- samatman 3y agoClimate 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 complete solution, but with it, the political will to shut down remaining emissions is easy to muster. Some people think we'll have AIs soon for whom "design me a fusion reactor which is 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar" is the sort of input which gets the requested output. I am skeptical of this. But it isn't an incoherent thing to believe. Where cancer is concerned the situation is much less clear.
- dale_glass 3y ago> Some people think we'll have AIs soon for whom "design me a fusion reactor which is 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar" is the sort of input which gets the requested output. I am skeptical of this. But it isn't an incoherent thing to believe. 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.
- skepticATX 3y agoThe 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!
- mlinhares 3y agoMagic or god. I’m at a point that if I can replace AI with magic/god in a phrase I know it’s bullshit.
- Davidzheng 3y agoChess AI is pretty much chess god
- idle_zealot 3y agoThe real test is to replace AI with "humanity, given 1000 years". If the statement is reasonable after replacement then it is possible. If it still sounds unlikely then it merits deeper inspection. Will humanity cure cancer given 1000 of study and medical development? It's quite possible, and AI will probably help. So it's not unreasonable to claim that AI can cure cancer (eventually).
- skepticATX 3y ago> humanity, given 1000 years The problem is that this makes almost anything sound reasonable, besides things that violate the laws of physics. I don't think that thinking this far out is anything but pure speculation. Whether the mechanism is human intelligence, AI, or magic.
- ToValueFunfetti 3y ago"AI will cure X" is equivalent to "Human intelligence will cure X", except that we expect AI to get there first because it's denser and can be replicated orders of magnitude more quickly and cheaply. You can levy a couple of counterpoints- that humans will never cure cancer either or that this kind of AI is impossible- but those are magical pessimism moreso than the alternative is magical optimism.
- zamalek 3y ago"AI will..." is either the som of human hopes and dreams, or the sum of human fears. I wonder if industrialization was anything like this (though I don't think ML will end up being comparable to the industrial revolution).
- pylua 3y agoI am sure generative ai will be able to cure cancer after humans figure it out then post it to the internet.
- jimjimjim 3y agoYeah. In this current hype cycle phase the general population thinks that ai is chatgpt and that chatgpt can do anything. Both statements are completely wrong but people will believe it
- pama 3y agoIn my not so humble opinion, AI will help medicine and will accelerate the design of new cancer therapies. Curing all possible forms of cancer almost seems like a red herring, given how fragile the human cells are, and how these cells generally become more fragile with respect to becoming cancerous as we age. However, better drug therapies will eventually make cancer a more manageable condition for a large fraction of the population and hopefully for everyone in the long term. I am sure the realities of the current health care system will be dramatically different than those of healthcare in 100 years from now. I agree with Rachel that patient led medical research is a very important area that is greatly aided by AI and will have an impact in medicine.
- yashap 3y agoI 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, in terms of getting healthcare professionals to analyze the results 3. People often get the analysis wrong, in terms of both false negatives and false positives 4. False positives can lead to even more scans, analysis, etc., costing even more money It does seem possible to me that specialized AI could get much better than humans at interpreting this data, doing it very cheaply (solving problem 2) with far fewer false negatives and false positives (solving 3 and 4). And it’s even possible that AI powered robotics gets great at collecting data in the first place, bringing down the cost of problem 1. Basically, “AI invents cures for different types of cancer” seems like a moonshot, but “AI makes proactive medical scanning cheap and effective, thus greatly improving cancer outcomes” seems like a real possibility. While we have some proactive screening for some types of cancer, the status quo for many types of cancer/patients is “wait until the cancer has spread enough that the patient is experiencing significant symptoms, with no systematic way to detect cancer early.” This is clearly not great. We’re accepting this for practical reasons today, but I do think AI has a significant chance to greatly improve the status quo here.
- mlyle 3y ago> 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 population of cancers detected late and with progression.
- CamelCaseName 3y ago> 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. Wow! That makes so much sense! I had never considered this!
- boringuser2 3y ago[flagged]
- supergirl 3y agowhen people say AI will cure cancer they mean AI will find some novel idea that no-one tought about. the article is more about how AI will fail at medical practice.
- wccrawford 3y agoOr merely that it'll be used to accelerate what we can already do to the point that it's revolutionary. Other computer advances have done the same, like the ability to finally create Folding@Home at a level that it'd matter. It's easy to say "X will do Y" when X is a force multiplier for things we already do. The fact that it could also come up with new ideas is a bonus on top of that, making it even easier to say.
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- b20000 3y agoi am puzzled why people think there is true intelligence in AI. IMHO it is advanced interpolation or morphing similar to the photo morphing tools of the 90s. if the data is not in the model you can’t get it out. you can only get interpolations out of it of data in the model. the more sophisticated the interpolation the more people think there is intelligence. maybe i am missing something but this is what i perceive.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tomNth 3y agoAnd true intelligence can get data they don't have ? true intelligence isn't magic.
- b20000 3y agohumans have imagination and creativity and other qualities …
- optimalsolver 3y agoCould you specify a set of tasks you believe AI won't be able to do?
- b20000 3y agoIMHO AI will be able to generate solutions close to the best solution for a problem, with the remaining distance to be covered by humans. the question is whether the cost of using AI to generate a solution, and then fixing it manually, will be lower, or higher, than building the solution using humans. as we have seen before with wizards and other tools to generate solutions, the cost of fixing the solution is often times higher than it is to just build it from scratch manually. also, as humans use AI more and more, there will be less and less material to use for training that is high quality, and AI will train on itself, leading to a rapid decline in quality of the output.
- SilentM68 3y agoI think a better title should be, "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and Big Money!
- passion__desire 3y agoActually many people think removing humans completely when they think of AI medicine. But I believe in AI that can provide helpful suggestions and narrow down the causes. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzA9VATcZhY [1] https://ada.com/ https://ada.com/
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- resource0x 3y agoCould you name one thing AI can't do? AI will cure everything. Whatever remains uncured, quantum computer will cure it too, in a very short order. /s
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoAnd we will use a blockchain to keep track of all these cures. And the survivors will all meet in some type of metaverse.
- renewiltord 3y agoMy 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.
- thuuuomas 3y ago> The patience and understanding of an LLM cannot be beaten. Embarrassing. Hope somebody hugs you today.
- renewiltord 3y agoThis is a really low quality comment, dude. Do better.
- lencastre 3y agoI think AI will detect new forms of cancer that we today believe are not cancer. IANAD
- ummonk 3y agoI don't see any reason to believe that AGI or even existing LLMs will be worse in these respects than the doctors of dumb algorithms mentioned in the article. If anything, I'd expect AI models to have potential to help mitigate the kinds of issues described.
- _xerces_ 3y agoI 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 researchers themselves and doctors are a pretty diverse group.
- matsemann 3y agoWhy is facts about how these systems hurt people leftist?
- gfodor 3y ago[flagged]
- matsemann 3y ago[flagged]
- squigz 3y agoCould you please provide some examples?
- gfodor 3y agoCapitalizing Black, and using the word “privileged” to describe individuals without specifying what kind of privilege
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoI don’t know what you could be saying other than that caring about poor people or welfare recipients is a leftist meme. That was pretty much all of the “leftism” in this article.
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- geoffmac 3y agoThis article seems to avoid talking about the core improvement AI will make to radiology - more accurate analysis. It mentions that patients may not get an MRI in the first place...but at least for those who do, surely there will be an improvement. The referral/bias issue will exist no matter what the technology is used. garbage article.
- rafaelero 3y agoBad articles like this is the reason why I keep buying Nvidia shares.
- jdthedisciple 3y agoScrew the downvotes- this one really gave me a chuckle, LOL
- mattmaroon 3y agoI can’t understand why people all write these articles about something fast evolving. Five years ago people would hang thought “AI will make art” laughable and now some very successful movie producers are shuttering projects because they think they’ll be using it soon. Today’s AI won’t cure cancer, but we have no idea what the AI of 20 or 200 years from now will be able to do.
- bluesounddirect 3y agoAi 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 .
- geoffdouglas 3y agoAI will cure cancer if it didn’t already just as much AI will help continue prevent the awareness of such cures.
- JSavageOne 3y agoSuch a bloated, meandering, poor written article. Just get to the point. Gave up halfway through and author still hadn't addressed the title.
- jdthedisciple 3y agoBecause it's more about leftist politics than AI and Medicine ... I was just as disappointed.
- mmaunder 3y agoI 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”.
- jph00 3y agoRachel and I are well aware of the promise of AI as a research tool. I created the first company that focussed on deep learning in medicine. Rachel has a PhD in math and is now doing a masters in immunology, and is trying to help figure out to bring AI to medical research. The point of the article is that AI as a research tool is insufficient to result in improvements to patient outcomes on its own. The article includes, for instance, the example that better MRI interpretation doesn't help those people that are being refused an MRI. Rachel and I quit our jobs and spent years, entirely for free, helping make AI more accessible to more people. We did that because we think AI is great! Pointing out that helping patients requires more than just AI is not anti-tech, it's pro-human. We can care about both the technology and the context in which it operates.
- mmaunder 3y agoThanks Jeremy. Makes sense. What you all have accomplished is incredible, particularly in democratizing AI via your learning materials. Fast.ai is required learning for our team.
- hobom 3y agoLike the OP, I also greatly respect the work Rachel and you did for AI. Nevertheless, I can't help but think that you are seeing this issue to negatively. "The point of the article is that AI as a research tool is insufficient to result in improvements to patient outcomes on its own." This seems unlikely if you consider this question as-is. Past technological improvements has made healthcare better overall without requiring societal changes necessarily. Take mRNA vaccines, a technology that has improved Covid-19 outcomes tremendously. Sure, certain groups have less access than other groups, but surely even marginalized groups are better off overall because of the existence of these vaccines. Health is not a zero-sum game. And I think this negative attitude also misses the potential of AI by default. Yeah it sucks that not everyone gets MRI access, but those that do will benefit, including marginalized groups. I guess it feels wrong to some people to express a positive sentiment at an unjust state of affairs, but improved diagnosis and treatments translate into lives saved. You also have to compare AI to the status quo. Sure, AI will have biases, but so do humans (as Rachel points out!) and the decisive question is whether AI has less biases (similarly to how safety of self driving cars is judged). With AI you at least have a chance of analyzing the decision making, and making it objective. We should be extremely excited about this possibility!
- randcraw 3y agoThe 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.
- RandomLensman 3y agoScience is also about finding new/different ways to understand the world from existing data (e.g., new theories might describe existing data better).
- celdon25 3y ago…Alphafold?
- ak217 3y agoFirst, this article is about medicine, not science, so I'm not sure that the critique is well targeted. Your critique might apply to an article written about the use of AI/ML in science, in which case it would be uninformed - algorithms like DeepVariant, DeepConsensus, and AlphaFold are fundamental AI-enabled tools for gathering and interpreting new information from existing sensors that changed the state of the art and are advancing science and enabling cures today. AI-enabled tools are also improving information management and literature search for scientists, because advancing science usually is about making better use of the info you have - a lot of scientific breakthroughs today are made by analyzing data that has already been gathered (like Genbank or UK Biobank or All of Us data).
- mchusma 3y agoIf I understand the article, it’s that if you keep everything the same and simply replace ai for human doctors, then you won’t have better outcomes. Basically, you sometimes need multiple diagnostics and actually need to get scans and medical imagery to detect issues. These are all directly improved by AI. AI should make diagnosis cheaper and more effective, with less bias. MRIs should cost 1/10th as much as we increase the throughput of machines with AI (as several people are working on) and reduce the need for expensive human labor. It’s the lowering of cost that feels like the revolution in healthcare. AI should enable nearly free ways of mining noisy signals in the body could catch issues. Smart toilets, mirrors, scans, etc. all help.
- jmcgough 3y ago> MRIs should cost 1/10th as much as we increase the throughput of machines with AI (as several people are working on) and reduce the need for expensive human labor. I work in the emergency department of a busy hospital. MRIs are pretty labor intensive to perform and take 15m to an hour. We are not going to get to a point where we are regularly scanning people with MRIs without clear symptoms of CVA etc. They require techs to run, you aren't going to remove much "expensive human labor" other than making initial radiology reads faster. The article makes the distinction that someone needs to decide to order those time-consuming, expensive scans, and that is where the point of failure is right now, in that we sometimes write patients off as delusional. AI can't help in situations where we have no data.
- skwirl 3y agoThis article had nothing to do with AI (and that was the point). It’s largely a regurgitation of the same polemics you’ve read about “capitalism” a thousand times in the last decade with AI in the title just to get you to click.
- htk 3y ago"There is already a clear pattern in which AI is used to centralize power and harm the marginalized." Too bad this was in the last paragraph or so, it could've spared me from reading the rest if it was in the beginning.
- tim333 3y agoIn fairness "AI is used to disproportionately benefit the privileged while worsening inequality" was near the beginning. Not the best article really.
- jdthedisciple 3y agoSpot on, the true agenda behind this became entirely obvious to me right after reading that sentence. Otherwise also a mediocre, rather incoherent piece especially for someone with a PhD.
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- atleastoptimal 3y agomany “AI will never be able to do X” are extrapolations from past versions of AI diagnosis, and don’t entertain a bit of speculative extrapolation over what AI could truly be. it will be so much more than simply analyzing scans.
- luke-stanley 3y agoAlphafold is not mentioned in the article, I didn't notice anything especially related to it mentioned in it either. I think Alphafold is a pretty insightful as a mental model, for thinking about how AI might help with curing cancers.
- jdthedisciple 3y agoThat's because the author isn't really interested in the matter itself, only in spewing obviously leftist talking points.
- bitwize 3y agoAI (as we talk about it today) is statistics. Better statistical models will help us identify diseases, and maybe molecules we can use to fight those diseases. But "AI" is not magic sauce you can slather on to a problem to get a solution. It's going to take statistics-savvy medical professionals, and medicine-savvy data professionals, working together. We've complicated things to bring solutions within reach that might've not been within reach before, so we're going to have to be smarter about how we apply these new tools.
- Kalanos 3y agoCancer is here to stay as long as organic DNA is the source code of molecular biology. The combination of data gathering and AI will help accelerate every step of drug development to make cancer more manageable, but we still need to think in terms of 50+ years for serious progress. https://key.bio https://key.bio
- thenerdhead 3y agoBut if we map everything we know and start to collect as much data as possible, we can let machine learning do the heavy lifting… https://www.science.org/content/article/giant-project-will-chart-human-immune-diversity-improve-drugs-and-vaccines https://www.science.org/content/article/giant-project-will-c... I think these general statements are fine. I believe that AI will cure long COVID and ME/CFS soon. I have already seen AI predict these illnesses with outstanding accuracy with no known biomarkers identified, drugs and molecules being found to neutralize it, and even new parts of the virus being identified to target. I feel like this is the most exciting time to have one of these illnesses, cancer included. We may indeed find a cure for everything. Or at least everything we amply fund with billions of dollars. https://everycure.org/ https://everycure.org/ We just entered the golden age of immune-cell therapies. I just can’t even imagine what we will do in the next ten years.
- qrian 3y ago[Docters still use pagers](https://ferd.ca/notes/rhip-doctors-and-pagers.html https://ferd.ca/notes/rhip-doctors-and-pagers.html) and [put password in post-it notes on the device](https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-you-want-my-password-or-a-dead-patient.html https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-you-want-my-password-or-a-dead-p...) not because the new technology have no value, but the system it brings often fails to account for the reality, aka existing systems. The 'what AI is trying to solve is not the problem' viewpoint of this article is also in the same vein, in that current AI discourse does not account for our society and systems. Unfortunately as a non-specialist techno-optimist, I can't help but view it as a problem to be solved.
- nojvek 3y agoThe issue with Transformers based AI is humans think it is a golden pill often trusting it more than they should. We are far from AI that models reality.
- 93po 3y agoDo you have any support for this argument?
- nojvek 3y agoThat we're overtrusting AI? Wonderful book on it https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-Inequality/dp/0553418815 https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-In... https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/10/1081351/are-we-ready-to-trust-ai-with-our-bodies/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/10/1081351/are-we-r... https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05232 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05232
- 93po 3y agothanks
- qgin 3y agoMachine learning has already made liquid biopsy cancer screening possible: https://grail.com/multi-cancer-early-detection/ https://grail.com/multi-cancer-early-detection/
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- paulmd 3y agoIt will misunderstand neither.