If we knew that we probably wouldn’t need AI to tell us.
But realistically: perhaps by noticing patterns we’ve failed to notice and by generating likely molecules or pathways to treatment that we hadn’t explored.
We don’t really know what causes most diseases anyway. Why does the Shingles vaccine seem to defend against dementia? Why does picking your nose a lot seem to increase risk of Alzheimer’s?
That’s the point of building something smarter than us: it can get to places we can’t get on our own, at least much faster than we could without it.
I don’t think that lack of intelligence is the bottleneck. It might be in some places, but categorically, across the board, our bottlenecks are much more pragmatic and mundane.
Consider another devastating disease: tuberculosis. It’s largely eradicated in the 1st world but is still a major cause of death basically everywhere else. We know how to treat it, lack of knowledge isn’t the bottleneck. I’d say effectively we do not have a cure for TB because we have not made that cure accessible to enough humans.
Flying is a bad example because airlines are a thing and make flying relatively accessible.
I get your point, but I don’t think it really matters. If a cure for most (or all) cancers is known but it’s not accessible to most people then it is effectively nonexistent. E.g it will be like TB.
> We have treatments (cures) for TB
TB is still one of the top 10 causes of death globally.
Things like antibiotics are plenty accessible - 3rd world countries are literally overusing and misusing antibiotics to the point of causing drug resistance in TB. "Effectively we do not have [thing] because we have not made that [thing] accessible to enough humans" is an exercise in goal-post moving.
About 15% of people over the age of 15 are illiterate, but it'd be silly to say "effectively we don't have literacy", even in a global context. Depending on the stat, 1 in 10 don't have access to electricity, but electricity has been in 50% of American homes for over 100 years.
The reality is that the future is unevenly distributed. AI and more broadly technology as a whole, will only exacerbate that uneven distribution. That's just the reality of progress: we didn't stall electrifying homes in NYC because they didn't get electricity in Papua New Guinea.
If AI discovers a cure for cancer, it may be incredibly unevenly distributed. Imagine it's some amp'd-up form of CAR-T, requiring huge resources and expenses, but offering an actual cure for that individual. It'd be absurd to say we couldn't consider cancer cured just because the approach doesn't scale to a $1 pill.
> As an example, in the UK in 2013 the cost of standard TB treatment was estimated at £5,000 while the cost of treating MDR-TB was estimated to be more than 10 times greater, ranging from £50,000 to £70,000 per case.
I pulled this from Wikipedia. It does not look like TB treatment is “plenty affordable”.
If the issue is with the semantics of the word “cure” that’s not a hill I’ll die on, but can you see how knowing how to cure something and actually curing something are two vastly different things?
If you told someone a cure for cancer existed but there’s literally no way they could afford it, that sounds a lot like the cure effectively doesn’t exist for that person.
So I’ll posit that the weirdness of such a statement depends entirely on your audience.
If you’re one of the people likely to be able to afford such a cure, it might sound nonsensical.
I’ll also note that I intentionally selected a term with a more narrow definition “effective existence” vs a more general term “existence”. E.g. something can be true in general but effectively false in practice.
