Thank you. This is something very close to my heart.
AI has enormous potential for improving medical treatments, curing cancer and so on. This is not in the future; it's in the past already. Even though all the AI companies talk a lot about curing cancer, there's actually one company only that has really made real progress, and it's Google DeepMind. It released AlphaFold, which is really helping drug discovery, and got the Nobel Prize for it.
Cancer has already gone from killing maybe 80% of the people for some types to 20%, so we're sort of 80% of the way towards curing cancer. The key risk I worry about is simply that we squander all these incredible benefits by letting AI-based pharma remain completely unregulated, which can cause a backlash. Many of you remember there was a product called thalidomide that was sold in Canada and America to pregnant women with morning nausea. Because pharma was completely unregulated back then, this caused over 100,000 babies in North America to be born without arms or legs, which in turn is why the Food and Drug Administration was created.
Yes, let companies innovate, amazingly, and cure diseases with AI, but let's treat them the same way we treat pharma companies and make sure they don't get their products released until they have been properly tested.