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Microsoft Will 'Solve' Cancer Within The Next 10 Years By Treating It Like A Computer Virus, Says Company (independent.co.uk)
Microsoft is serious about finding a cure for cancer. In June, Microsoft researchers published a paper that shows how analyzing online activities can provide clues as to a person's chances of having cancer. They were able to identify internet users who had pancreatic cancer even before they'd been diagnosed, all from analyzing web query logs. Several months later, researchers on behalf of the company now say they will "solve" cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells. The goal is to monitor the bad cells and potentially reprogram them to be healthy again. The Independent reports: The company has built a "biological computation" unit that says its ultimate aim is to make cells into living computers. As such, they could be programmed and reprogrammed to treat any diseases, such as cancer. In the nearer term, the unit is using advanced computing research to try and set computers to work learning about drugs and diseases and suggesting new treatments to help cancer patients. The team hopes to be able to use machine learning technologies -- computers that can think and learn like humans -- to read through the huge amounts of cancer research and come to understand the disease and the drugs that treat it. At the moment, so much cancer research is published that it is impossible for any doctor to read it all. But since computers can read and understand so much more quickly, the systems will be able to read through all of the research and then put that to work on specific people's situations. It does that by bringing together biology, math and computing. Microsoft says the solution could be with us within the next five or ten years.
If there's one thing Microsoft has comprehensively and irrefutably established over the last 35 years of their existence, it's that they haven't the faintest clue how to identify or eradicate viruses.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If your definition of a human is a retarded 4-year-old that can be trained to name colors with 75% accuracy, yes.
We're not there, we're not even close; "machine learning" is just the new buzzword in town, rising from the ashes of "big data".
... machine learning is the solution. And cancer is not "like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells". That is how an actual virus works, hence the analogy by which the "computer virus" term came to be. Cancer is more like when a bit randomly flips in RAM and then by pure coincidence this causes a memory leak within an infinite loop that spreads shit all over the place until everything comes crashing down.
If we can solve the problem of cancer within 10 years by treating it as a computer virus, why not treat gravity as a computer virus and come up with practical, cheap antigravity? Or that pesky light-speed limit, we need to beat that, and 10 years sounds about right
Bruce Perens.
He was right. It was effectively eradicated, at least as far as users were concerned, by 2006. Though the credit for that goes to Google, not Microsoft.
Am I the only one who is scared about the fact that these clueless fuckwits have enough data on us to diagnose which of us has prostate cancer?
Diagnosing that someone has prostate cancer because they've googled "symptoms of prostate cancer" isn't rocket surgery.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it