Terence Tao's Math 2.0 lecture uses thalidomide case to argue results can outrun comprehension
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-11
In his 'Math 2.0' public lecture at Caltech, Terence Tao showed a slide citing thalidomide and lenalidomide, approved for cancer around 2005/6, whose mechanism of action as PROTACS was only elucidated in 2013. Andrew Curran's commentary: if a cure actually worked, almost any Stage 4 cancer patient would consider human comprehension of its mechanism irrelevant — an analogy for the tension between AI results and human interpretability.
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