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Comment by wolfram74 | Hacker News Reader

Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them.

[0]https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...

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Treating cancer is not the same as curing it. Currently, no doctor would ever tell you you are "cured", just that you are in remission.

Cancer is approaching being a managed chronic disease. That isn’t remission.

In my experience, most people with cancer that I know simply oscillate between having life-threatening active cancer/tumors and remission.

I don't know any case where people have detectable cancer and it's just being managed, I think that's more the exception than the rule.

For my girlfriend, when she was in her last stages they had to do that (try to slow down/manage the cancer instead of remove it), but that was already palliative care and she died soon after. Also, the only reason they didn't try removing the tumor is because the specific location in the brain (pons) is inoperable.

Yes, we're getting better at treating cancers, but still if a person gets cancer, chances are good the thing they'll die of is cancer. Middling results.

Because we're not good at curing cancers, we're just good at making people survive better for longer until the cancer gets them. 5 year survival is a lousy metric but it's the best we can manage and measure.

I'm perfectly happy investing roughly 98% of my savings into the thing that has a solid shot at curing cancers, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.

Maybe it should give you pause then, that not everyone else is investing 98% of their savings?

It gives me pause that most people drive cars or are willing to sit in one for more than 20 minutes a week.

But people accept the status quo and are afraid to take a moment’s look into the face of their own impending injury, senescence and death: that’s how our brains are wired to survive and it used to make sense evolutionarily until about 5 minutes ago.

How AI will cure neurodegenerative diseases and cancer?

If we knew that we probably wouldn’t need AI to tell us.

But realistically: perhaps by noticing patterns we’ve failed to notice and by generating likely molecules or pathways to treatment that we hadn’t explored.

We don’t really know what causes most diseases anyway. Why does the Shingles vaccine seem to defend against dementia? Why does picking your nose a lot seem to increase risk of Alzheimer’s?

That’s the point of building something smarter than us: it can get to places we can’t get on our own, at least much faster than we could without it.

I don’t think that lack of intelligence is the bottleneck. It might be in some places, but categorically, across the board, our bottlenecks are much more pragmatic and mundane.

Consider another devastating disease: tuberculosis. It’s largely eradicated in the 1st world but is still a major cause of death basically everywhere else. We know how to treat it, lack of knowledge isn’t the bottleneck. I’d say effectively we do not have a cure for TB because we have not made that cure accessible to enough humans.

That’s a weird way to frame it. It’s like saying we don’t know how to fly because everyone doesn’t own a personal plane.

We have treatments (cures) for TB: antibiotics. Even XDR-TB.

What we don’t have is a cure for most types of cancer.

Flying is a bad example because airlines are a thing and make flying relatively accessible.

I get your point, but I don’t think it really matters. If a cure for most (or all) cancers is known but it’s not accessible to most people then it is effectively nonexistent. E.g it will be like TB.

> We have treatments (cures) for TB

TB is still one of the top 10 causes of death globally.

Things like antibiotics are plenty accessible - 3rd world countries are literally overusing and misusing antibiotics to the point of causing drug resistance in TB. "Effectively we do not have [thing] because we have not made that [thing] accessible to enough humans" is an exercise in goal-post moving.

About 15% of people over the age of 15 are illiterate, but it'd be silly to say "effectively we don't have literacy", even in a global context. Depending on the stat, 1 in 10 don't have access to electricity, but electricity has been in 50% of American homes for over 100 years.

The reality is that the future is unevenly distributed. AI and more broadly technology as a whole, will only exacerbate that uneven distribution. That's just the reality of progress: we didn't stall electrifying homes in NYC because they didn't get electricity in Papua New Guinea.

If AI discovers a cure for cancer, it may be incredibly unevenly distributed. Imagine it's some amp'd-up form of CAR-T, requiring huge resources and expenses, but offering an actual cure for that individual. It'd be absurd to say we couldn't consider cancer cured just because the approach doesn't scale to a $1 pill.

> As an example, in the UK in 2013 the cost of standard TB treatment was estimated at £5,000 while the cost of treating MDR-TB was estimated to be more than 10 times greater, ranging from £50,000 to £70,000 per case.

I pulled this from Wikipedia. It does not look like TB treatment is “plenty affordable”.

If the issue is with the semantics of the word “cure” that’s not a hill I’ll die on, but can you see how knowing how to cure something and actually curing something are two vastly different things?

So let’s flip things: how widespread or how cheap does something have to be for you to consider it to exist? Everyone on earth, available for $1?

To say something is “effectively nonexistent” because it’s not got literal 100% availability for the world’s populace is just weird.

If you told someone a cure for cancer existed but there’s literally no way they could afford it, that sounds a lot like the cure effectively doesn’t exist for that person.

So I’ll posit that the weirdness of such a statement depends entirely on your audience.

If you’re one of the people likely to be able to afford such a cure, it might sound nonsensical.

I’ll also note that I intentionally selected a term with a more narrow definition “effective existence” vs a more general term “existence”. E.g. something can be true in general but effectively false in practice.

Maybe along the lines of alphafold 3 https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/google-deepmi...

Ah, yes: "well, we can't cure cancer or autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases, but I'm willing to invest basically all my money into a thing that's...trained on the things we know how to do already, and isn't actually very good at doing any of them."

...Meanwhile, we are developing techniques to yes, cure some kinds of cancer, as in every time they check back it's completely gone, without harming healthy tissue.

We are developing "anti-vaccines" for autoimmune diseases, that can teach our bodies to stop attacking themselves.

We are learning where some of the origins of the neurodegenerative diseases are, in ways that makes treating them much more feasible.

So you're 100% wrong about the things we can't do, and your confidence in what "AI" can do is ludicrously unfounded.

Every doctor and researcher in the world is trained on things we already know how to do already.

I’m not claiming we haven’t made a dent. I’m claiming I’m in roughly as much danger from these things right now as any human ever has been: middling results.

If we can speed up the cures by even 1%, that’s cumulatively billions of hours of human life saved by the time we’re done.

But what they can do, that AI can't, is try new things in measured, effective, and ethical ways.

And that hypothetical "billions of hours of human life saved" has to be measured against the actual damage being done right now.

Real damage to economy, environment, politics, social cohesion, and people's lives now

Maybe, someday, we improve the speed of finding cures for diseases? In an unknown way, at an unknown time, for an unknown cost, and by an unknown amount.

Who knows, maybe they'll give everyone a pony while they're at it! It seems just as likely as what you're proposing.

> I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.

I know, shocking isn’t it?

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