AI doesn’t “think.” It processes probabilities of correlations.
An average adult has more than 30 trillion cells. Some small % are going wrong in one way or another all of the time. In most cases the cell defect results in apoptosis (it just dies) or the immune system recognizes the bad cell and destroys it. The problem with cancer cells is the defect does not result in apoptosis or immune attack. Our current treatment methods are better than bloodletting but still barbaric. We give the patient high doses of toxic chemicals since cancer cells grow quickly and will hopefully absorb the toxins quicker than normal cells and die befire we damage too many normal cells. We also use radiation concentrated on or in (seeds) the cancer hoping the dose is high enough in the cancer to kill most of it and not so high elsewhere that we kill too many normal cells. Think of cancer as an immune system defect (can’t recognize this particular batch of bad cells). Two newer treatments, CAR-T and immune checkpoint inhibitors show a great deal of promise since they actually address the problem. They are still crude since we haven’t refined the technique enough to recognize only specific enough cancer cell surface markers but that will come in time.
Good post.