Pure math has conjectures and we know, a priori, a criterion that defines a proof or disproof. (We can quibble about the format. Do we want Lean? Rocq? A human readable thing?)
In medicine, the proof is in the trial data, period. Except that even that may not actually be good enough — problems may show up later. And a swarm of agents in an RL system cannot inspect transcripts to figure out WTF is going on in patients. If you want data, you do an an experiment. If you want 100 variants of that, you can’t just spawn 100 sandboxes.
Oh, and once the trial is done, it’s done. You can try to “distill” data from it, but you are not about to rerun the trial with rollouts from the next model in the pipeline. It may even be literally impossible: once the first credible drug for a previously untreatable fatal condition is available, you can’t do a another controlled trial against placebo.
In medicine sometimes (more in the “old days”) someone would see that compound X caused Y and then they’d try to make a therapy that helped the patient without killing them. Other times, someone has a theory that pathway P seems to cause indication I, and so tries to develop a compound that relatively safely disrupts P in vitro, then tries it in vivo. Sometimes even after the drug works and is approved we later find the pathway P hypothesis was wrong, yet it somehow works anyway. And then people try to figure out what’s really going on.
And then, especially in psych and oncolo drugs, the meds mysteriously work on some people but not others. Teasing that out is tough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science-Based_Medicine
Is this the school of thought that you mean?
Mistake your unknown for known: that is sickness.
Only be sick of the sickness, and you are not sick.
The sage is not sick: sick of the sickness, he is not sick.
— Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 71
I always assumed the research and trials are there just for that.
I understand from an engineering perspective.
Newton invented and used Calculus to great effect, long before it was formally proven to be consistent and logical.
For example, if the prompt is something like "give me a cocktail that is most likely to succeed in this specific phase three trial" there are any number of ways the AI might find ways to game specific features of the trial design.
Ironic that his vaccine skepticism evaporates when there’s an opportunity to be contrarian. Or maybe he’s changed his mind now that the overwhelming evidence of the Covid vaccines proves he was full of shit
We should be joyful and excited. Instead, those of us who gatekept knowledge, including us software engineers and even mathematicians, are viewing this future with fear and trepidation. Because we lose our power, prestige, and leverage over the rest of society.