AIdeas

One of the technologies supported by AI that I envision will not only benefit the world, but is rather selfish as it would enhance my reach and impact in my own career. This was mentioned in our NYT article from this week called “Is There a Smarter Path to Artifical Intelligence? Some Experts Hope So”, and is the incorporation of AI into drug discovery. As an organic chemist that works in drug design and synthesis, time and time again I have thought about how if chemists were more technologically savvy we could expedite our productive process immensely with the right software. Hours on hours are spent in labs across the world doing tedious tests that could be simulated or performed by AI, or predicting products and reactants that could be suggested in seconds by AI.

My vision of this technology is not well-developed; I just know that a lot of what myself and many of my peers do is sifting through scientific literature to find the perfect reaction conditions and reactants to make a product. With AI, I think we can create a robot that can complete this process rapidly and give an output of potential routes that could be successful. Of course, chemistry in theory more often than not fails to mimic experimental results. This is why the adaptive learning of AI would be integral. We could input the outcome of experiment and have AI adjust future suggestions of routes to reach a product, probably making connections as to causes of failures better than most humans, and giving refined routes to test again.

Currently, it can take upwards of ten years for a drug to be successfully designed, synthesized, tested, and then approved to reach market. At least a couple of these years are the design and synthesis stage, but is a stage that is vastly overlooked when people talk about the drug discovery process. Even Randy last class never mentioned synthesis when he talked about his project on building AI for drug discovery in the future. If AI is to be incorporated into the latter stages of drug discovery and implementation, there’s no reason why synthetic chemists should be kept in the stone ages in the lab. Ethically, AI in this field would not pose as many challenges as in most fields, since its role would be to refine suggested experimental parameters based off results. It’s possible AI could be used once robotics are more refined to perform the actual experiments, under which circumstances the same ethics that apply to human scientists would apply to AI robots: falsifying scientific data. I think at least for now, it is more difficult to program AI to lie than to report factual information, so this challenge is definitely surmountable, if not completely avoidable.

Another vision I have for AI in the future is less personal, but still related to health, is the role of AI in cancer care and treatment. Currently doctors spend huge amounts of time reading medical studies, outcomes of clinical trials, and about new potential treatment options for cancer patients. Integrating this information into the diagnostic process can prove challenging on a daily basis. AI could play a hugely helpful role in integrating new and old information constantly, and suggesting treatment options, chemotherapy cocktails, and potential clinical trial matches for patients so that doctors could then direct their energy and attention into making a decision with the patient, with a narrower scope.

Ethically, this is a fine line to walk since AI in healthcare is literally putting someone’s life in the hands of a robot… Albeit, a robot programmed by a human. I think the human component is essential in evaluating a patient’s needs and condition and making the ultimate decision, but as long as AI can function properly as programmed to consolidate and suggest the relevant information, it could be revolutionary in making cancer diagnoses and refining therapies.

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