Submission Statement: This article is relevant to this sub because it explores the main bottlenecks to progress (particularly in drug discovery) and makes the claim that many of the obstacles hindering progress are legal, institutional, economic and political in nature. She explicitly mentions the field of drug discovery where the development of new drugs has slowed down even though scientific tools have grown significantly more powerful. In medicine in particular, one of the biggest bottlenecks are clinical trials which today take ~7 years and cost more than a billion dollars per drug. Here, she believes that AI can help accelerate clinical trials, particularly with discovering surrogate endpoints and biomarkers, but here the hurdles are regulatory and institutional in nature with companies having issues accessing datasets from institutions like the NIH
She also argues that economic incentives shape the kind of biomedical innovation that happens. She discusses the phenomenon of target herding: where most companies end up chasing the same drug targets since they are a lot less risky, and as a result the biological space that does get explored is smaller than it could be. You also can't really patent drug targets anyway: the patent system rewards drug molecules that get discovered and not drug targets, further incentivizing companies to spend more of their time chasing new drug molecules
She devotes the second half of this to criticize San Francisco AI culture. She mentions that elite tech circles have become a monoculture where any skepticism of the transformative benefits of AGI are treated as low status. She argues that many within tech are ignorant about these other bottlenecks to AI diffusion due to the messianic belief that AGI will fix everything
Posted by erasmus_phillo