Data scientist and PhD Neuro
Yama
Karma: 9
I think in this analogy the narrow AI models would be like texting your parents instead of flying to see them. Obviously not as good as visiting them in person, but you avoid the 10% x-risk. I think Rob is saying let’s make sure we don’t stop the development of texting/calling as collateral.
So yes, don’t get on the plane, but let’s be very specific about what we’re trying to avoid.
As a final‐year PhD researching chronic pain, I’d clarify that central sensitization (Woolf & King, 1989) is strictly a mechanistic term for central hyperexcitability, whereas nociplastic pain (IASP, 2017) is the clinical category applied when central sensitization and/or other mechanisms drive pain despite no detectable tissue damage.
Nociplastic pain is another category of pain, different from nociceptive and neuropathic pain, which applies when it cannot be fully explained by pain mechanisms from the latter groups.
That said, it also depends on our ability to identify the underlying causes. For example, consider trigeminal neuralgia: most cases are caused by vascular compression of the trigeminal root, a clear structural lesion, so they meet the definition of neuropathic pain. However, before we had high-resolution MRI or surgical confirmation, many of those could have been mis-labeled as “neuroplastic” simply because the lesion wasn’t detectable.
Also, we shouldn’t label nociplastic pain the “single most common” cause of chronic pain without compelling, large-scale prevalence data.