Article URL: https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the-main-bottleneck Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183076 Points: 41 # Comments: 20

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying everyone or even a majority of people in the SF tech scene think this way. But some certainly do (e.g. the opening conversation is verbatim) and this post is about a particular core scene whose views carry disproportionate weight in the discourse and in policymaking. At a recent dinner, someone from an AI lab asked me, quite bluntly , why I do what I do — why I write about the regulatory bottlenecks to medical progress, why I spend my time on policies related to clinical trials. He looked at me with something best summarized as pity. I told him what I believe: that in the age of AI, medicine will be bottlenecked more than ever by regulation and the grind of clinical trials, and that billions poured into faster pre-clinical research won’t touch that problem, unsexy as it is. I brought up housing: we’ve had the technology to build better housing for decades, yet it’s more expensive than ever, because housing is a question of political will, not pure capability. Ruxandra's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. He looked at me incredulously. Surely, a smart person like me should know that AI, or better said, AGI will be hyperpersuasive soon – already on a bunch of benchmarks it exceeds professional debaters at persuasion. I said, “Hmm.” He said, “Yes, yes”, with the undertone of a man who knows things deeply, things that mere mortals like me, not being AI lab employees, are simply not well placed to grasp. And he looked at me again with that sense of pity, the way one looks at a slightly mentally impaired but cute animal awaiting its imminent slaughter. That night I lay awake, twisting and turning, wondering whether my life had any point at all. Whether every decision I’d ever made had been, in some way, a mistake. What could I have done better? But as the sun came up, I found my way back to the same thought: no matter how “intelligent” AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world. It is hard to hold on to that conviction when people smarter than you, with access to privileged information, insist otherwise. After all, this could all just be “cope” from the naive hamster awaiting its slaughter. Because the people at these labs made fortunes betting on ideas that once looked insane, the world now takes nearly everything they say on faith. That, I think, is a mistake. It is not a given that AI will solve the problems most people actually care about, including medicine, unless we think about those problems clearly. And at the moment, I don’t believe we are or at least, not to the extent that we could. My case is simple, and it comes from two directions. One is what I observe in the social dynamics of San Francisco, and in how people there talk about all this. The other is what I notice in a field I happen to know something about: medicine.