Derek Lowe 批评 Dario Amodei 称十年内消除癌症等疾病

A number of people have asked me about Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and his statement in a recent video presentation that’s part of the runup to their planned IPO). He says (and he’s said stuff like this before) that “. . .cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, mental illness — these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade”.

In the same way that he (and others) have said things like this, I have said what I thought about them. Here’s a response to Microsoft talking about curing cancer in five to ten years, in 2016.  I have of course had an awful lot to say about AI in drug discovery, much of it linked in this post from 2025 about similar statements made by Demis Hassabis of DeepMind. Those extensive links go back to 2007; I’ve been beating on these points for a long time now, and you’d think that by now I’d have switched to solitary sheep-herding or something for all the good it’s done. All the arguments I can make against Amodei’s ridiculous and embarrassing statement are contained therein.

But in a way, I can’t just make this about Silicon Valley types, great through their presence is in this sort of magical thinking. Here’s a post about a 2003 statement from the then-head of the FDA about wanting to “eliminate suffering and death” due to cancer by 2015. And here’s a post from 2015 itself about a statement from the head of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute saying that “it is actually plausible that in ten years we will have cures and therapies for most, if not all, human cancers”. So there are many people (who really should have known better) saying the same sorts of hopeful drivel.

I wish we’d stop. Stop talking about how we’re going to cure cancer and everything else in X number of years (or just Real Soon Now in general) and spend more time going out and doing it. I realize that’s not as much fun, nor does it grab the headlines nor juice up an upcoming IPO. But it’s the only responsible thing to do. We have a long way to go before we can start talking about being able to cure most cancers, let alone all the other human diseases, and there is more work to be done than any human being can even grasp. So let’s get on it rather than uselessly flapping our mouths and looking foolish a few years later. What do you say?

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