Comment by catlifeonmars
18 days ago
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.
That’s a weird way to frame it. It’s like saying we don’t know how to fly because everyone doesn’t own a personal plane.
We have treatments (cures) for TB: antibiotics. Even XDR-TB.
What we don’t have is a cure for most types of cancer.
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.
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