He’s probably wrong about medicine.
Ray Kurzweil writes:
After working in the (AI) field for 61 years – longer than anyone – I’m happy to see AI at the heart of the global conversation. Yet most commentary fails to consider how larger language models like Chatgpt and Gemini fit into an even larger story. AI is poised to take the leap from just revolutionizing the digital world to transforming the physical world as well. This will bring countless benefits, but three areas will have particularly profound implications: energy, manufacturing, and medicine.
This is from “Ray Kurzweil on how AI will transform the physical world” The EconomistJune 17, 2024. (closed)
Kurzweil defends his argument well.
Another excerpt:
In contrast, AI can quickly sift through billions of chemical compounds in simulation and is already driving innovations in photovoltaics and batteries. This trend is about to accelerate significantly. Throughout history, as of November 2023, humans have discovered approximately 20,000 stable inorganic compounds that can be used in all technologies. Then Google’s gnome AI discovered even more, bringing that number overnight to 421,000. Yet this only scratches the surface of materials science applications. Once much smarter AGI (artificial general intelligence) finds perfectly optimal materials, mega photovoltaic projects will become viable and solar power may be so abundant as to be almost free.
The abundance of energy is enabling another revolution: in manufacturing. The costs of almost all goods – from food and clothing to electronics and cars – come largely from a few common factors such as energy, labor (including cognitive work like R&D and design) and raw materials. AI is poised to dramatically reduce all of these costs.
Where he fails is in medicine. Not that he doesn’t make the point that, in a relatively unregulated market, AI could easily have huge positive effects on the types of drugs we put into our bodies. That’s because he seems to ignore the immense power that the Food and Drug Administration has over what drugs we will be allowed to have.
He writes:
Much more laboratory research is needed to accurately power larger simulations, but the road map is clear. Next, AI will simulate protein complexes, then organelles, cells, tissues, organs and, ultimately, the entire body.
This will ultimately replace current clinical trials, which are expensive, risky, slow and statistically insufficient. Even in a phase 3 trial, there is probably not a single subject who matches you on all the relevant factors of genetics, lifestyle, comorbidities, drug interactions, and disease variation.
Digital trials will allow us to tailor medications to each patient. The potential is staggering: curing not only diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, but also the harmful effects of aging itself.
This will only happen if the FDA backs down substantially. Let us hope, but let us not let hope outweigh the painful lessons of experience.
