We Need a Cure for AI Health Hype

As Amy Dockser Marcus writes for The Information, we’ve been here before. In 2000, on the heels of the first sequencing of human DNA, Francis Collins, then-director of the Human Genome Project, predicted that “in another 20, 25 years we should be able to prevent or cure most cases of cancer, of diabetes, of heart disease, of multiple sclerosis, of asthma.” And yet, here we are, 26 years later, facing a growing epidemic of chronic diseases.

Daphne Koller, CEO of the AI-driven drug development company insitro, calls it the “magic wand” assumption. “Hundreds of years into modern medicine,” she writes, “our understanding of most human disease, and much of healthy physiology, is best captured by the parable of the blind men and the elephant; in this case, a really huge elephant.”

The current debate about whether AI can cure all diseases is more than a tempest in a GPTeapot. It points to a larger problem: we are too often focused solely on improving the machines, and too rarely focused on investing energy and resources in improving humans.