Be nice if we cured cancer with A.I., no?
That’s in part what I’m working on. Caveat: for reasons too complex to go into here, my belief is that we will never completely cure cancer, because the same mechanisms that drive and optimize evolution (a base mutation rate driven by the size of DNA and external influences like cosmic radiation) also drive the mutations that cause cancer; you can’t have one without the other. But we will cure specific instances of cancer in specific individuals. Over and over again. In other words, it becomes a long, slow game of whack-a-mole, rather than a death sentence.
AI comes into play in a lot of areas, including drug discovery. But where I’m using AI is in clinical care -- helping find and organize a medical record that is distributed among many providers, make sense of it, and provide rational options for treatment to the physicians. It’s an "augmented intelligence" approach, rather than a "get out of the way and let AI drive" approach; the human caregivers are the ultimate decision makers, and the intelligent system helps the human be more productive, comprehensive, and accurate.
The place we are focusing on is in cancer and rare diseases -- places where a single patient can have hundreds, sometimes thousands of health care encounters, and the overall record of the patient is overwhelming for any one person to deal with. When you couple that with the (sad) fact the Medicare only reimburses for 15 minutes total for both prep and a patient visit in any encounter, if you can condense that prep time from 9 minutes down to 3, your have doubled the amount of time the physician gets to actually spend with the patient. And provide better options for treatment.
Most of my career has dealt with either engineering tools or various aspects of computational finance and transaction processing, helping people make more money. This current work is so much more karmically rewarding...