[roenxi]

Fair point; let me put it this way:

Database hype was relatively muted and databases made a massive impact on our ability to cure diseases. AI hype is wildly higher and there is a reasonable chance it will lead to the curing of all diseases - it is going to have a much bigger impact than databases did.

The 10-15 year timeframe is obviously impossible for logistic reasons if nothing else - but the end goal is plausible and the direction we need to head in next as a society is clear. As unreasonable claims go it is unobjectionable and I'd rather be standing with Hassabis in the push to end disease than with naysayers worried that we won't do it as quickly as an uninformed optimist expects.

[ecb_penguin]

> there is a reasonable chance it will lead to the curing of all diseases

This is complete nonsense. AI might help with the _identification_ of diseases, but there is nothing to support the idea that every human ailment is curable.

Perhaps AI can help find cures, but the idea that it can cure every human ailment deserves to be mocked.

> I'd rather be standing with Hassabis in the push to end disease than with naysayers worried that we won't do it as quickly as an uninformed optimist expects.

It's a good thing those aren't our only options!

[roenxi]

> but there is nothing to support the idea that every human ailment is curable.

There is; we can conceivably cure everything we know about right now. There isn't a law of nature that says organisms have to live less than centuries and we can start talking seriously about brain-in-jar or consciousness uploading now that we appear to be developing the computing tech to support it.

Everything that exists stops eventually but we're on the cusp of some pretty massive changes here. We're moving from a world with 8 1-in-a-billion people wandering around to one with an arbitrary number of superhuman intelligences. That is going to have a major impact larger than anything we've seen to date. A bunch of science fiction stuff is manifesting in real time.