Machine learning finds an improved way to match donor organs with patients
ccaim.cam.ac.uk
ccaim.cam.ac.uk
Better outcomes by what metric? If out of two people after the operation one will live 5 years and another 6 years -- which one would you choose? How would you trade 5 years of one's life against the 6 years of another's? Family, number of children, societal impact, race, gender, etc ? How to quantify all that?
Not to mention your argument could be trivially used to justify social credit scores etc, which most people would agree is bad.
Aside from reinforcement loops being an issue, ML is only as good as the programmer makes it. And we will have no idea how it was constructed and neither will non-tech health professionals. Theres no way a system like this can be described in its entirety without mistake to surgeons when one line of code changes everything.
So maybe it can help out human decision but I would not want this to have final say for quite some time.
But it's good to see more real world application of machine learning - feels like the distance from research to application is very slow.
"Machine learning radiology" is something I used to monitor as a sign of improvement - since it's a "simple" use case. Too "busy" to google about now - any news on this ?
There wasn't really a pure closed form mathematic solution to the problem like we can on static graphs (Gale-Shapely algorithm for one). You find papers like this one [2] with heavy math and some sort of proposed solution.
So this type of problem is a really a good fit for machine learning to propose solutions.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_matching 2. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Thickness-and-Informat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
The biggest increase to human health span will be when we start replacing our bodies wholesale as they age.
Head transplants onto monoclonal, HLA-non-expressing (antigen free) bodies at age 50 will renew cardiovascular, pulmonary, and immune health (eg new thymuses). It resets almost all of the genetic cancer clocks in our bodies. Coupled with drugs to combat brain tissue waste aggregation and plaque formation, it could see humans through to multiple hundred years life spans.
As for ethics, the monoclonal bodies will be grown in a lab, without brains, born out of chimeric pig uteruses and artificially innervated for endocrine regulation.
I talk about this a lot in my HN post history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673243
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28534681
I do believe that growing clone organs individually, if it turns out to be possible, would be a solution. But otherwise, slaughtering a living human to save another is never going to be acceptable.
A human body grown without a head or brain?
That's the moral equivalent of a houseplant or a pile of lumber.
Nobody cries over HeLa cells dying millions of times over. Or any other cell line.
This is far more moral than killing lab rats. And it could end most diseases forever.
It may be possible in the future to grow parts of human bodies without the conscious bits, but we definitely don't know how to do it today beyond style very simplistic tissues.
It's also important to note that there is no reason to believe that it is possible to grow a human body without a head or brain. It may be, but it may well not.
Also, the brain and head age like the rest of the body, and a full body transplant would be just about the most extreme kind of surgery you could undorgo. I see no reason to believe that such extreme surgery would succeed in prolonging life, except in the most dire of circumstances (imminent vascular failure, terminal metastasized cancers that happen not to affect the brain). In most cases, for relatively healthy aging humans, it would certainly be a significant reduction in lifespan with anything similar to today's medical technology, even if you had a young healthy donor body.
You're also ignoring that for a healthy body to develop, you need much more than a few electrical signals and nutrients. All of the muscles need to be exercised, for example, or will atrophy entirely. The bones need to be rattled the way normal walking does, or they will not develop enough. Even if you could achieve that with electrical stimulation, other parts of your muscles may atrophy as well - for example, there's no guarantee that the nerves in your arms would be kept alive if they never received signals from your brain.
Even if these problems are fixable - and they may well not be fixable! - the costs to grow a body in this way will be enormous, especially since we're talking something like 10-20 years of constant care. This is never going to be an accessible technology for mass medicine, it would just be the province of the extremely wealthy.
Do be young as long as you live.
To cure people of cancer, heart, lung, liver, kidney, and other diseases. Intractable diseases.
Once it becomes normalized, you'll even see people swapping their bodies for ones they prefer. Gender. Increased height, musculature, or VO2max. Transgenic craziness.
Why not?
Why accept what we have now?
If you haven't checked, we're below replacement rate in the West. Apparently most don't find kids to be a priority either.
I'm going to spend every effort to maximize my one in infinity chance of experiencing the cosmos. Because after this, there's nothing.
Make it long enough, and we might get to see it through to the end. An extreme long shot that demands a near perfect play through. But hey, what else is there to pursue?
Making widgets and drinking whiskey while growing old? Everyone else seems to be exploring these well traveled paths. I'm not content to hope it ends there.
That's your starting point for making this kind of decision.