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Comment by sowhat1 | Hacker News Reader

Really hoping AI can accelerate more palatable cancer treatments. Wishing this guy a complete recovery.

Ai can accelerate a lot of things but drug development is mostly depending on long processes involving human reviews and human trials that can't be shortened unless you do a massive regulation reform.

but that's a reflection of how poor of an understanding we have of our own biology, right? if we understood ourselves like we understood computer hardware then we could have ~deterministic drugs. it seems plausible that AI will speed up the research and understanding of ourselves and the increased confidence will reduce the need for as careful of review.

That's a big fat if. We think we understand plant biology but no one has ever created one gram of artificial wood. This isn't attacking you personally but it's pretty clear many on this site have never spent ten years of their life on a drug to watch it fail in phase three trials.

There's likely lots still to discover about biology and A.I. doesn't generate new data, rather rearranging old data. That's still helpful but developing new tools to make basic science discoveries to expand the knowledge pool seems to be the rate limiting factor rather than rearranging existing knowledge.

AI seems antithetical to this. Both vibecoding and the recent math proofs have both shown that AI-driven work results in increased productivity at the expense of high-level understanding and confidence.

lol because covid vaccine.

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