WTF?! The promise that AI is going to cure cancer has failed to materialize, but some AI researchers are so sure it'll happen one day that they've taken up smoking. That's according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who says this comically bad idea is a sort of flex to show others how much faith they have in the technology.
Sankar made his claim during an interview on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday. The exec talked about Pascal's quote of how there is a God-shaped vacuum, or hole, in the heart of every person, and how many AI workers in Silicon Valley had filled that hole with the machine god that is AI (or AGI, as he calls it).
As an example of this unwavering faith in their Warhammer 40,000-like machine god, Sankar claims that many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI.
"'I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I will – I'm showing you my chips are all in.' So there is kind of this mass psychosis social delusion around it," the Palantir executive said.
Assuming this is true, and it very well may be, given some people's fetishism of AI, it's very stupid and a bit sad. Even if AI did help scientists develop effective treatments for some cancers, smoking can cause several different types of the disease.
Moreover, there's the time it takes to test these treatments in clinical trials, and let's not forget the numerous other non-cancerous but still potentially fatal conditions smoking can cause. So maybe think twice before deeply inhaling those tar-filled toxins into your spongy lungs.
Despite being filled with health-obsessed types like Bryan Johnson, there have been several recent articles about how smoking is making a comeback in certain tech circles, so maybe some of what Sankar says is true. Or perhaps in these uncertain times we live in, the smokers think there might not be a future to worry about – ironically, a big part of that is driven by the threat from rogue AI.
While not on the level of curing cancer, an AI-generated drug was reported last month to have shown signs of a different breakthrough: slowing the aging process. There were some caveats, of course, the big one being that changes in aging markers don't prove we'll soon be living to 150 or older.