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Comment by symlinkk | Hacker News Reader

Crazy how slow medicine progresses compared to technology.

Biology, and by extension medicine, only started to look like engineering in the last ~50 years because it requires serious advancements from many other fields of science. As in, you can't discover cells if you haven't invented a microscope yet. It's literally reverse engineering alien technology, in the sense that it's something that wasn't created by humans. And you can't really reverse engineer something when you don't have any tools to meaningfully interact with it and pick it apart.

How do you even compare those two things? And how do you separate technology from medicine? This statement seems like pure nonsense, hinging on a slippery definition of "technology" that in some contexts means "consumer gizmos," other contexts means "computers," and in yet other contexts means "Civilization tech tree."

I disagree - if you move fast and break things then people die. The human body is not a single well-understood system; everyone is different in subtle ways, which incidentally is why personalised medicine is becoming a thing.

People die if you move too slow too.

It definitely feels that way, especially compared to fields like computing where progress is exponential. But with medicine, the stakes are so much higher... Every breakthrough has to go through years of testing, trials, and regulatory hurdles to make sure it's actually safe and effective

I hope it dramatically speeds up as AI improves. ASI is likely only scalable route to solving the medical issues that plague humanity.

I imagine the slow link is that you have to actually test stuff in the real world, on people. Who in this case could very easily die if it doesn’t work. Isn’t like programming where you can just keep whacking it until it works.

Its even worse than you think, there are complex and numerous requirement hoops you need to jump through for medical software and hardware. It is not easy.

The question I have is why they they die if it doesn't work. Imagine how much faster we could progress if people didn't when an experiment failed. But how could we even accomplish such a thing? Telemetrics to catch issues early, and redundancy to hold the patient over until the issue can be found and corrected?

In this case, two separate mechanical hearts built on different principles hoping they would have different failure modes? Would it even be possible to hook that up correctly? Just brainstorming.

Wait I thought that was blockchain

Building an ASI that cares enough about humanity to solve our medical problems sounds much harder than actually solving them.

I think ASI being able to care, in any sense, is something that is far off. Same for ASI itself, any optimism that it's invention is somehow inevitable in our lifetime is severely misplaced.

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