More than that, as I understand it, coming up with drugs is not the bottleneck. It’s all the testing and clinical trials that take forever. Drug companies optimize this by having multiple irons in the fire at any time, but it’s not even like AI would help there. The work is in shepherding drugs through the approval process.

But why not?

I mean, you can determine the molecular structure of things. Look at xray and cryo-electron microscopy. Why should that be a topic that can not be solved programmatically?

> The AI would need to be able to predict all effects a specific molecule has on a human.

So you can have fully automated labs. You have organoids that can be combined as a test system (or as pseudo mini brains). Why would that be impossible by AI? I don't understand that assumption. To me, the problem set is finite, so of course it COULD be solved. Which unique feature do humans have that AI could not simulate? We have robots and automated labs. I don't really see why humans would be necessary to find autogenerated drug xyz.

> very unlikely to be more effective than current drug development.

I highly doubt that claim. I more smell that some people are worried about losing overpriced drugs here. Imagine if AI were to lead to cheaper drugs that work perfectly fine still. Personally I'd still prefer to see AI vanish, but that is also unlikely to happen. I don't understand the rationale you give here though. Why can AI not design drugs? What is the real explanation here? I mean, penicillin was invested by fungi and discovered mostly by accident. AI can not have anything like that?

[dead]