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Comment by sunnybeetroot | Hacker News Reader

Will you still hate AI when it discovers the cure for your cancer?

People can absolutely have complicated feelings about things that help them.

My life is sustained by medicine produced by large international pharma companies, and I also feel really uncomfortable about that.

Exactly right. We all have to survive on a personal level - that's our instinct. But we can only try and minimize our impact and do the best we can, even though on a global scale supporting the current system is not a good thing in many cases.

I don't think badly of anyone who uses AI who makes a living because, survival. But on the other hand, I think the world would be better off without it. One can still wish for a better world while trying to survive in the current one using the tools at one's disposal, even if that situation is suboptimal.

That’s fair, I think it’s possible to be both grateful for the existence of capitalism funding research into those companies and disgust over how much money they make.

If I did get cancer, my survival instinct might indeed get me to use it. But I'd still hate AI because it's very likely that the cancer would be caused by all the stuff we've done to the planet and AI would then just be another bandaid that would probably in turn cause more cancer because of how it will encourage more people to use resources, and how it probably will cause more stress to the average human being.

And solving some cases of cancer is not worth the even greater medical problems AI will be foisting upon the world.

You raise a possible outcome and I’m going to raise another in that AI allows us to come up with the technology to improve/reverse the impact to the planet.

> You raise a possible outcome and I’m going to raise another in that AI allows us to come up with the technology to improve/reverse the impact to the planet.

History has shown that we've never used technology to do that. We always go for the economic return first. We only use technology to ameliorate immediate pain, never to avoid long-term disaster.

Even green energy/solar panels - the CO2 curve hasn't been flattened because we're always constrained by business as usual. It's human instinct. I sincerely doubt AI can have a net positive impact because we're already seeing for every 1 good outcome, 100 greedy ones from the elite.

That’s valid, I remain hoping :’>

The "AI" that is being used to find cures for cancers is not the same "AI" that is being used as an excuse to fire people, especially programmers.

The latter is LLMs. Generative AI, chatbots, etc.

The former is analytical AI: machine-learning systems using computer vision techniques to recognize patterns in CT scans (and similar) that humans aren't precise enough to pick up on.

They are derived from similar principles, but no one is trying to sell DetectMelanomaChat as a replacement for you or me.

It won’t. And I will.

I’m not sure if your question misunderstands what AI is and what it can do, or if it misunderstands what cancer is and how medical research works.

It was more of an expression to say that AI will improve health outcomes due to its ability to increase the speed at which research is done.

It might do that, but as it looks currently you likely won't stand to benefit.

And what about the health outcomes that it will negatively impact? Like increased rare earth mining in poorer countries that cause illnesses? Oh wait, we're only talking about health incomes of those that can afford it. Never mind.

We can cross that bridge when we get there

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