alt Hacker NewsBut 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?
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The world isn’t deterministic and there isn’t just one human you have to test against.
What works for one, kills another.
Just look at what peanuts can do. If your tests don‘t take something like this into account, you get in trouble. And there are lots of those things to test against, known and even unknown.
And then there is evolution. What works today, doesn’t work tomorrow.
Or things like this happen
https://www.wgbh.org/tv-shows/reactions/how-an-hiv-miracle-d...
And of course there is the profit thing, that creates problems to give everyone the treatment they need.
AI can help prevent defeat but there is no winning
Solving protein structures, and specifically protein structures bound to ligands that are your potential drug candidates are very, very early phases in drug development. That is before even the phase 1 trials.
It's important work and a significant effort, but it's not where the actual difficulty in drug development lies. 90% of drugs fail after that point, and that is where you need to get better if you want to beat the current approaches.
AI also can't run drug trials faster than humans. They take a lot of time, effort and money.