What AI Companies Get Wrong About Curing Cancer (with Emilia Javorsky)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
flagship promise across tech companies that are developing artificial general intelligence or super intelligence has been cure cancer.
What motivates the discussion on AI and cancer?
Don't we want to cure cancer? How could you be against the development of this technology? You're holding up cancer treatments. Think of the children here. On a deep human level, that's not a promise that you throw around lightly or flippantly, given how deep of a problem this is and how deeply this affects everyone's lives.
How does intelligence compare to data bottlenecks in cancer treatment?
In general, grand challenges just don't tend to be sort of intelligence limited problems. There are problems around data, there are problems around incentives, there are problems around coordination. At the basic science level, there's actually very little data that is in a format or accessible to being trained by AI. Super intelligence cannot model something that does not have first principles and does not have data. We have a system that fundamentally rewards incremental thinking and not necessarily rewards out of the box thinking. So like step one is like, how can we actually use AI systems to encourage out of the box ideas just as much as the inside of the box ones to get more of those going?
Welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast. My name is Gus Stocker, and I'm here with my colleague, Emilia Jaworski. Emilia, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me, Gus.
Great. You have a new essay called AI versus Cancer.
What challenges arise from cancer's complexity and heterogeneity?
That's a long walkthrough of everything we know about what AI can and can't help with when it comes to cancer. So maybe we want to start with you and your sort of background and credentials, and then talk a little bit about the problem of cancer before we get into the meat of the essay.
Absolutely. Thank you, Gus. So my background, I am a physician and scientist by training. And before I went to medical school, had a former career in public health. And so throughout my career, I've touched a lot of different aspects of the health care and discovery ecosystem from medicine. the macro public health side of things down to being a postdoc and doing bench research to being in the clinic to co-founding a startup. So I've actually had the opportunity to see each of those phases of development of a new therapy and get sort of the insight into how the sausage is made and like what is the narrative of how these things happen and then what's actually happening in the field and on the ground of how these things happen.
And by sort of a series of events, as life is, I originally was involved in sort of biosecurity about 10 years ago and became interested in the intersection of that, at that time, the emerging idea of AI that was coming onto the scene and have been involved since then in the AI conversation for the better part of nine, 10 years. And For a long time, these two lives I had were very disconnected, talking about AI policy and the quest for super intelligence, and then doing science in the lab and thinking about how to actually get new therapies to patients. And those kind of collided in recent years with this promise that's coming out of a lot of the big tech companies that this technology, in fact, will deliver cancer cures, which has kind of been one of their flagship promises.
So I decided to say, hey, like, we should break that down. And I've been pretty surprised how unexamined that promise has gone in sort of popular culture and throughout narratives and media and news that it's kind of accepted at face value that, oh, this technology will do this thing that is being claimed. And so I kind of felt seeing the disconnect between what where the state of that technology is and how that problem's being approached from the AI side and knowing what's actually happening on the ground on the biotech and medical side, highlighting where that delta is and where technology can and can't move the needle.
Yeah, great. So maybe let's start with that promise. Maybe describe to me what does that promise look like from the AI companies? What do they believe about how AI will cure cancer?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:07
2
What motivates the discussion on AI and cancer?
0:07–0:25
3
How does intelligence compare to data bottlenecks in cancer treatment?
0:25–1:25
4
What challenges arise from cancer's complexity and heterogeneity?
1:25–4:13
5
How does AI play a role in drug development?
4:13–5:01
6
What regulatory hurdles does AI face in the healthcare sector?
5:01–6:09
7
What practical paths exist for advancing cancer cures?
6:09–6:56
8
How can AI help reduce medical bureaucracy?
6:56–1:12:09
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Future of Life Institute Podcast
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James Manyika on Global Economic and Technological Trends