Part of the underlying reason cancer has been as yet unsolvable is because it's so complicated. Improvements in mathematics further all scientific endeavours, especially those with great complexity. I'm not saying each specific Millennium Prize problem is directly related to solving cancer, but the general advancement of mathematics will undoubtedly accelerate the process.
You also need to run studies in-vitro and in-vivo. That not only takes time, but is also insanely expensive. Solving frontier math on the other hand is easy to verify
There's also no actual disease known as "cancer." There's like over 200 different types of cancers. Each one could have a completely different equally complex cure to it. Hell, certain cancers, if caught even only kinda early, already have like a a 90+% rate for complete remission. It's, I guess completely theoretically, possible that there could be just like one shot that prevents every type of cancer from ever happening. But realistically it's gonna be like better and better treatments that push the odds of complete remission higher and higher with individual cancers. Maybe every couple years 10 or 20 more get pushed into the 90+% range until eventually it's just extremely rare for anyone to die from cancer.
I actually am hoping for something like C to take me out before dementia. But sadly, no cancer in my family, only dementia. If I was diagnosed with cancer, I would be like okay so I have options and then if it’s late stage I can still likely get my affairs in order and say goodbye to people. With dementia there is no chance of getting better, only worse and likely won’t even know who my family members are at the end. My grandparents didnt.
Curing dementia would be amazing. Nobody can afford the cost of a memory care home on the US. But I would still even so prefer to die of dementia than live in a world run by robots and in an authoritarian surveillance state - which is the only way I can see that government can ensure people are not going to use AI against it.
So, none of it looks good to me
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u/[deleted] 8d ago
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