Comment by arcticfox
2 days ago
I'm pretty optimistic. I think it's a threshold question where we need a number of basic technologies to all get over certain bars before the floodgates start to open.
Over the past 1-2 decades there has been unbelievable progress at the basic technology level but most people are unimpressed because they haven't translated yet due to not individually being sufficient to cause an explosion of progress. IMO, we're starting to see it finally as so many different technologies have gotten so cheap, fast, and good.
So we're waiting for the Apple of the medical world to take a bunch of preexisting things to be applied together in a way that makes the whole much more valuable than the pieces. Or we need all of the individual lions to come together to make the Voltron?
I think realistically we're waiting for someone in the top 10-20 richest people in the world to get cancer (or a close relative etc) who will then throw billions at research to try and fix the problem.
We spend upwards of $15B a year globally on cancer research. About half of that is funded by government and charities, half by pharmaceutical companies.
If spending billions was the main trick, we’d know it already.
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Usually it takes about a decade for most medical inventions to work their way through medical bureaucracy[0], so I'd say that 10 years ago we were at the stage of watching Matthew Broderick war-dialling with an acoustic coupler and reading Usborne Books telling us that criminals of the future would work from home, and today we're in the exciting early days of dialup, AltaVista, and GeoCities[1].
[0] The covid vaccines collectively were faster only due to the fact that when money is no object you can parallelise a lot of options and can pipeline the testing stages rather than waiting for full review and another funding round before progressing to the next stage
[1] Where they-don't-tile-but-we-did-it-anyway animated gif backgrounds are the metaphor for home kits to make random things bioluminescent: https://www.the-odin.com/gfp-bacteria/
So according to your timeline, we're ~10 years from medical research becoming enshitified?
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We already had this. It was called Theranos.
I'm not sure what this comment is trying to say. Theranos was a company build from the ground up on fraud. Apple, for all its faults, is provably at the forefront of technology used in personal computing devices.
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I don't know if we "had" something called Theranos. In fact, I believe that was the subject of a couple of lawsuit because we didn't.
the public experiences biotechnology as decades of nothing, followed by years of everything once bottlenecks align
I think it's just a tech thing! Same as when the internet really got going or what's happening with AI
The floodgates open = the market will see that at least some of that can actually work and make money => they will pour funding => new approaches built on that funding will start working, too?