Breaking Through With AI: Real Healthcare Advances Today

We know that AI has helped us to make big advances in medical science: in mapping the human genome, and in solving for proteins (with Alphafold, etc) and in various kinds of diagnosis, drug discovery, and beyond. In fact, that may be the single biggest contribution of AI to date, and saves quite a few lives on a daily basis. There are the more quotidian types of screening that may trigger an important intervention, and then there are the broader paths of clinical analysis, that take time, and money – and a lot of patience.

I was privileged to interview Daphne Koller at the Imagination in Action event in California, our Next Endeavor summit Sept. 14-15. (Disclaimer: I help to put on these events.) Koller founded Coursera, so we covered education a bit, but right now, she’s involved in research that helps to promote better avenues for the kinds of medical innovations I mentioned above. So we talked a good bit about biology and the adjacent sciences, too.

Physics and Biology in Practice

“The world that we live in right now is the world where AI bits meet real-world atoms,
Koller said. “And I think people often underappreciate just how much complexity exists at that interface, and the fact that when you move out of the realm of the world where all of this data is being generated by the minds of eight billion people—images, text, and so on, on the web, code that you can generate and test immediately, and so on—and you have to exist in a world where (your efforts are) actually working, you’re working at the pace of the physical world. You’re no longer working at the speed of light.”

But, she noted, it’s also the world of the human body, and that’s where a lot of our conversation went, in terms of applied biology aided by AI.

Our Biology in Play

“You can make a prediction of what will happen if you perform an intervention in the real world,” Koller explained, “the ‘real world’ being the real-world body of individual patients like all of us.”

She asked this question:

Here’s more: