Alongside warnings about its ability to destroy humanity, artificial intelligence is also hailed for its potential to revolutionise health treatment. Just how far can it take us?
This — but, I’m sure at some point, AI could develop a cure for various cancers. If it’s a straight-up race between humans and AI, the AI will win. It doesn’t need to rest and it can do more, faster. I do not see this as being up for debate. If the human finds one cure first, it will be luck or it will be some dumb thing that the AI overlooked. Something like that.
But yes, if the companies paying for AI get the cure, they will not share it with the world, they will sell it at a very high price.
Most rich people aren’t stupid. Some were given their money, like the US president, but a lot of them are also educated. They realise the Earth’s population is not sustainable. They will happily let poor people die to create a better world for themselves. The cure will go to the rich and powerful, and they’ll let the working poor fight over the scraps.
Altruistic researchers should be the ones to discover the cures, but they probably won’t be. And even if they discover one or two, it doesn’t change much. Cancer isn’t one disease, it’s a family of diseases and a cure for lung cancer won’t magically cure brain cancer or breast cancer, unless we cure the root of all cancers — and this is where my education and experience fall short of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about here — which I believe is its uncontrollable reproduction. So I think if we could stop cancer cells from multiplying, that would go a long way toward treatment, but I would have to defer to the actual scientists and doctors here.
We don’t have AI though. We have LLMs which are glorified auto correct machines that generate globs of text based on which words are most likely to appear near which other words.
These “AI” tools are not the future of research. Sure, sometimes they get lucky and solve a complex problem, but most of the time they spew out useless junk that no one needs.
When the AI bubble pops, all of these LLMs will die off. A few will remain here and there, but they will be a shadow of what they are now.
Machine learning is what will, and already has, change the medical research field. Specialized algorithms to process mountains of data that would take humans ages to do. Probably the only good thing to come out of this AI bubble is all the research and advancements poured into machine learning.
This — but, I’m sure at some point, AI could develop a cure for various cancers. If it’s a straight-up race between humans and AI, the AI will win. It doesn’t need to rest and it can do more, faster. I do not see this as being up for debate. If the human finds one cure first, it will be luck or it will be some dumb thing that the AI overlooked. Something like that.
But yes, if the companies paying for AI get the cure, they will not share it with the world, they will sell it at a very high price.
Most rich people aren’t stupid. Some were given their money, like the US president, but a lot of them are also educated. They realise the Earth’s population is not sustainable. They will happily let poor people die to create a better world for themselves. The cure will go to the rich and powerful, and they’ll let the working poor fight over the scraps.
Altruistic researchers should be the ones to discover the cures, but they probably won’t be. And even if they discover one or two, it doesn’t change much. Cancer isn’t one disease, it’s a family of diseases and a cure for lung cancer won’t magically cure brain cancer or breast cancer, unless we cure the root of all cancers — and this is where my education and experience fall short of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about here — which I believe is its uncontrollable reproduction. So I think if we could stop cancer cells from multiplying, that would go a long way toward treatment, but I would have to defer to the actual scientists and doctors here.
We don’t have AI though. We have LLMs which are glorified auto correct machines that generate globs of text based on which words are most likely to appear near which other words.
Probabilistic scrabble isn’t going to cure shit.
To be more exact, if probabilistic approach could have found the cure for something, it has found it by now.
Breakthroughs typically require a new way of thinking about the problem, not throwing more brute force at it.
LLM = AI
AI ≠ LLM
What Big tech is currently pushing are LLMs, not the type of “AI” that could potentially find a cure. Hence the purpose behind my specificity.
https://www.math.net/symmetric-property-of-equality
This isn’t a mathematical equation.
All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. AI is the rectangle and LLMs are the squares.
These “AI” tools are not the future of research. Sure, sometimes they get lucky and solve a complex problem, but most of the time they spew out useless junk that no one needs.
When the AI bubble pops, all of these LLMs will die off. A few will remain here and there, but they will be a shadow of what they are now.
Machine learning is what will, and already has, change the medical research field. Specialized algorithms to process mountains of data that would take humans ages to do. Probably the only good thing to come out of this AI bubble is all the research and advancements poured into machine learning.