The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

In our current paradigm, once we have a potentially feasible disease-fighting agent, we can organize a few dozen or a few hundred human subjects and then test them in clinical trials over the course of months or years at a cost of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Very often this first option is not an ideal treatment: it requires exploration of alternatives, which will also take a few years to test. Not much further progress can be made until those results are available. The US regulatory process involves three main phases of clinical trials, and according to a recent MIT study, only 13.8 percent of candidate drugs make it all the way through to FDA approval.[5] The ultimate result is a process that typically takes a decade to bring a new drug to market, at an average cost estimated between $1.3 billion and $2.6 billion.[6]