4 ms·
As it relates to biomedicine, the AI community is increasingly toeing the "snake oil" line. Yes, machine learning/AI is powerful, but pie in the sky prediction
by pmags 1y ago
As it relates to biomedicine, the AI community is increasingly toeing the "snake oil" line.
Yes, machine learning/AI is powerful, but pie in the sky predictions such as the "end of disease" probably hurt more than help in the long run.
- NoTeslaThrow 1y agoWorks well enough to attract capital, though.
- GenshoTikamura 1y agoAnd to dupe the public
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- esperent 1y agoOne of the main barriers to developing new medicines is that there millions and millions of potential compounds to test. You can go out to your back garden and take a soil sample, it'll have a ton of never before tested compounds, the multiple that by an entire planet worth of samples to test, and it overwhelms human capacity. Testing these happens long before it ever goes to serious trials. Humans are very limited in how many results they can review, but if you can throw them to an AI and have it flag anything promising, then you've overcome a huge bottleneck. This isn't magic or snake oil, and as the data often looks like microscope slides or tables of figures, it's well within the capabilities of current AI models.
- andsoitis 1y agoNot all diseases are cured via compounds. Disease etiology spans both infectious and non-infectious. Infectious diseases are generally cured with antibacterial, antivirals, vaccines (what you call compounds). Non-infectious (genetic, degenerative, metabolic, autoimmune) diseases typically involve therapies beyond “applying a compound”. We’ve seen breakthroughs like surgery (eg removing an appendix or a tumor). Gene therapies such as onasemnogene abeparvovec cures spinal muscular atrophy in infants. Certain leukemias or autoimmune diseases are cured via stem-cell transplants.
- UncleMeat 1y agoEspecially given that the world's deadliest infectious disease (TB) already has a treatment. TB deaths today are caused by wealth inequality, not our insufficient medical knowledge. It would be nice to see discussion of this in the article, but it focuses instead on the limitations of AI.