AlphaFold Discoveries
Just like the Apple Newton and Google Glass lowered expectations for new technologies, IBM’s Watson likely had a similar effect. Watson for Genomics was meant to revolutionize healthcare and it supposedly had the intelligence of a third year medical student. However, it didn’t end up replacing health care workers or being implemented in a way that scaled better outcomes.
Might Google’s AlpfaFold from DeepMind follow the same path?
Likely not. AlphaFold isn’t being sold to hospitals as a cost savings tool (as IBM likes to sell things). Instead, it’s looking at helping discover new drugs. I won’t begin to show my ignorance by trying to explain what that is or how it works.
That said, there is a fundamental problem with discovering proteins and having a medicine that can save people’s lives — drug trials. Those are slow and arduous processes that have over a century been carefully crafted to avoid killing people. AI might predict whether that chemical will kill someone but we still have to have someone be the first one to try the drug.
That’s slow but necessary.
It could be that we’ll have to wait for lab grown human organs to run tests on these discoveries before we can be ready to get to market faster with new drugs taht are discovered by AI.
