4 ms·

I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear f

I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.

therobots927 6mo ago
Well it can build a killer front end and that’s great at impressing investors.
sixhobbits 6mo ago
Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?
- therobots927 6mo ago
  What exactly does “personalized medical treatment” entail? Writing prescriptions? Ok, I can see how AI could theoretically do that (assuming it doesn’t hallucinate and kill a bunch of people). Oh and don’t think it’ll be so easy to give AI the legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. And insurance companies may take issue with expensive prescriptions written by a chat bot. Perform surgeries? Stitch wounds? That’s decades away. And that also opens a legal can of worms. Maybe the AI lawyers can figure something out.
  - jnpnj 6mo ago
    maybe he's referring to people doing research on their own variant of disease through LLMs to find cures
    - therobots927 6mo ago
      That’s fine and dandy but it won’t do anything for most people with serious health problems.
      - jnpnj 6mo ago
        Some people (albeit probably not a lot) are really doing this for complex life threatening cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556729 (gitlab founder leveraging AI tools to find cure for his rare cancer)
- pona-a 6mo ago
  There's a video by Siliconversations [0] about it. Medicine is first and foremost limited by high-quality data, not intelligence. If OpenAI built a superhuman AGI tomorrow, it would not change a thing about the state of cancer treatment, at least not for a while. Trying to design a cancer cure by setting a trillion alight on AI is like trying to achieve UBI by funneling citizen's taxes into Polymarket, so they may operate their free supermarket. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijTxAfFUHkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijTxAfFUHkY
  - zozbot234 6mo ago
    How can we be sure of that when we don't even know what improved "intelligence" might look like in this context? Especially given the increased importance of "big data" (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics etc.) to the field and the sheer amount of obscure data that's currently buried in all sorts of archival sources and might be resurfaced with some "intelligence".
  - hephaes7us 6mo ago
    I don't think the above poster is talking about finding novel treatments, but rather that they're talking about aiding in diagnosis and navigating existing treatment options. We always wish that our doctors would stay up to date on all of the current medical literature as they practice, and some of them do. In theory, AI systems could greatly accelerate a person's ability to retrieve and extract insights from the current body of knowledge. Of course, that is highly fraught, but, in theory, I think I see what they're going for.
- spprashant 6mo ago
  Yes. But unfortunately that domain suffers from ambiguity which LLMs are bad at. Medical treatment has never been about asking questions and getting perfect answers. Excellent doctors and nurse practitioners have a great intuition for which questions to ask based on cues during patient assessment.
- Cytobit 6mo ago
  Medical treatment is already personalized though.
whiplash451 6mo ago
You could take the same issue with all productivity changes that came before AI (typewriters, laptops, etc)
- spprashant 6mo ago
  None of those seem like they had an capital investment equivalent to 1% of the GDP. Apparently railroad was the only technological investment that was higher than AI when measured as a percentage of the GDP.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
tsoukase 6mo ago
I think all tech CEOs sleep dreaming to replace the low level employees of all the world's companies with AI. Only then this huge investment will be justified. By just suggesting a painkiller or helping with a Windows problem is not enough.

I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.

therobots927 6mo ago

Well it can build a killer front end and that’s great at impressing investors.

sixhobbits 6mo ago

Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?

therobots927 6mo ago
What exactly does “personalized medical treatment” entail? Writing prescriptions? Ok, I can see how AI could theoretically do that (assuming it doesn’t hallucinate and kill a bunch of people). Oh and don’t think it’ll be so easy to give AI the legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. And insurance companies may take issue with expensive prescriptions written by a chat bot. Perform surgeries? Stitch wounds? That’s decades away. And that also opens a legal can of worms. Maybe the AI lawyers can figure something out.
- jnpnj 6mo ago
  maybe he's referring to people doing research on their own variant of disease through LLMs to find cures
  - therobots927 6mo ago
    That’s fine and dandy but it won’t do anything for most people with serious health problems.
    - jnpnj 6mo ago
      Some people (albeit probably not a lot) are really doing this for complex life threatening cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556729 (gitlab founder leveraging AI tools to find cure for his rare cancer)
pona-a 6mo ago
There's a video by Siliconversations [0] about it. Medicine is first and foremost limited by high-quality data, not intelligence. If OpenAI built a superhuman AGI tomorrow, it would not change a thing about the state of cancer treatment, at least not for a while. Trying to design a cancer cure by setting a trillion alight on AI is like trying to achieve UBI by funneling citizen's taxes into Polymarket, so they may operate their free supermarket. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijTxAfFUHkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijTxAfFUHkY
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  How can we be sure of that when we don't even know what improved "intelligence" might look like in this context? Especially given the increased importance of "big data" (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics etc.) to the field and the sheer amount of obscure data that's currently buried in all sorts of archival sources and might be resurfaced with some "intelligence".
- hephaes7us 6mo ago
  I don't think the above poster is talking about finding novel treatments, but rather that they're talking about aiding in diagnosis and navigating existing treatment options. We always wish that our doctors would stay up to date on all of the current medical literature as they practice, and some of them do. In theory, AI systems could greatly accelerate a person's ability to retrieve and extract insights from the current body of knowledge. Of course, that is highly fraught, but, in theory, I think I see what they're going for.
spprashant 6mo ago
Yes. But unfortunately that domain suffers from ambiguity which LLMs are bad at. Medical treatment has never been about asking questions and getting perfect answers. Excellent doctors and nurse practitioners have a great intuition for which questions to ask based on cues during patient assessment.
Cytobit 6mo ago
Medical treatment is already personalized though.

whiplash451 6mo ago

You could take the same issue with all productivity changes that came before AI (typewriters, laptops, etc)

spprashant 6mo ago
None of those seem like they had an capital investment equivalent to 1% of the GDP. Apparently railroad was the only technological investment that was higher than AI when measured as a percentage of the GDP.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

tsoukase 6mo ago

I think all tech CEOs sleep dreaming to replace the low level employees of all the world's companies with AI. Only then this huge investment will be justified. By just suggesting a painkiller or helping with a Windows problem is not enough.