(off-topic)
With AGI is coming, can we start talking about how it can actually improve our pathetic carbon-based lives?
One of the scariest things in life is the fact you can randomly have a stroke and become incapable. I've seen that happen to people I love, to streamers, to famous people. It is common, it is devastating, and it is one of the things I feel like humanity got wrong.
These days, I've been wondering whether there could be a way to greatly reduce your odds of going through this.
(From now below, please read this post as speculative science fiction written by a complete layman.)
I'm not talking about preventive measures, like controlling your pressure, eating well, or exercising. These are very effective, but they max out. Strokes can and do happen, even with perfect prevention and health. So, I'm talking about something stronger: an hypothetical first-aid treatment that would shut down a stroke at home; i.e., something like the Heimlich Maneuver, but for CVAs.
Let's imagine an hypothetically perfect intervention.
A clog is formed somewhere, it travels through your blood stream, and clogs an artery supplying blood to your brain. A side of your face drops, you lose fine movement on one of your hands, and that arm feels heavily. You're having a stroke. From now on, every minute causes you to lose ~2 million neurons. These will never grow again, and the synaptic information they carry is lost forever. Your house is on fire, and every minute something is lost, except it is not your house, it is you. And you want to stop the fire, ASAP.
You tell your partner, who is prepared to act. They grab device X. Device X doesn't exist, and it may not be physically possible, so, it is science fiction. But it is the kind of device I believe might be plausibly constructive, specially post-AGI. What it does is simple: it scans you and outputs, with great accuracy, whether you're having a stroke, and what kind of stroke you're having. That's all. Your partner uses it on you, and you get a response:
"You're having an ischemic stroke. There is a small clot (~4 mm) blocking the M2 superior division of your left middle cerebral artery. No signs of hemorrhage. Estimated onset: 4 minutes ago. Brain tissue at risk: moderate, fully salvageable. Clot is small and fresh; high likelihood of dissolution with IV thrombolysis alone. Dial 911 immediatelly, and administer tenecteplase now: 0.25 mg/kg as a single intravenous bolus over 5 seconds (estimated weight 72 kg, dose 18 mg). Keep patient lying flat. Re-scan in 15 minutes."
Your partner administers the IV tenecteplase, and calls 911.
15 minutes later, the ambulance isn't here yet.
Luckily enough, your face looks normal.
You use Device X again.
It says:
"Left M2 artery reopened. Blood flow restored. No hemorrhage detected. Brain tissue at risk: none remaining. Contact emergency services for routine post-thrombolysis monitoring."
So, by just injecting tenecteplase fast enough, you escaped a whole life of misery and suffering. You almost became a vegetable. Instead, you just gained a scary memory. And you just needed 2 things: *information*, and an IV shot.
In a very practical sense, in the presence of perfect information, tenecteplase would be a "near antidote" for about half of all strokes (85% are ischemic, most of which are caused by small clots). The only reason we don't give tenecteplase at home today is that, sadly, if you're having an hemorrhagic stroke, then, it actually makes things worse, and the average outcomes even out. So, the information provided by Device X is what would allow this first-aid treatment to be effective.
I asked Opus 5.5 to evaluate this exact scenario. That is, you have a small clot ischemic stroke, device X confirms that's the case, and you administer tenecteplase on your way to the hospital. According to it, the odds of complete recovery are ~72%, against ~58% of not administering it. Note that this estimative could be completely off; we don't have enough data because tenecteplase is rarely given that quickly!
That said, if this estimate is correct, then, that means that this intervention would reduce the odds for an average person to be disabled by a stroke in their lifetimes from 14% to 11%. For a perspective, a perfectly healthy person has 4%. So, even such hypothetical device would still be less impactful than diet, exercise, sleep. Yet, it would do *something*, which is better than nothing. I for one would surely have such device at home, if it worked exactly like that.
Now, just to be clear, this post is just me fantasizing about simpler ways that AGI could improve our lives without necessarily curing cancer or something. Device X is sci-fi, but feels like the kind of thing that AGI could help us design: a portable, cheap scanner (perhaps some mix of microwave imaging, ultrasound, and EEG, paired with a very good model) that does at home what a CT scanner does in the ER today. CTs already exist, the drug already exists, the bottleneck is purely getting the *information* quickly enough, and that's the kind of problem that I believe AutoResearch could potentially solve. Or not.
Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, and I have no idea what I'm talking about. For god's sake do not get ideas from this post. Tenecteplase will KILL you if you guess the wrong kind of stroke.