Researchers cig-nal their faith in AI by taking up smoking

What are they puffing? Tobacco, apparently. Cancer researcher tells El Reg it's a bad bet

Silicon Valley’s AI bros have supposedly found a new way to signal to those around them how committed they are to their industry: Take up smoking despite the risk of cancer, because they expect bots to develop a cure … any day now.

At least, that’s the claim Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar made in a recent interview on CBS's Face the Nation. In trying to explain what he described as a doomsday cult surrounding effective altruism, whose adherents include some AI researchers who believe the technology could bring about a utopia, Sankar claimed smoking has become a way for researchers to demonstrate their faith in the tech.

“So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said to the confusion of host Margaret Brennan. Those researchers “believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer, I'm showing you my chips are all in,” Sankar explained. 

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Sankar described the decision to take up smoking as a bet that AI would cure any health ailments that arose from it as “mass psychosis” and “social delusion” that’s getting in the way of actual discussions around the state of AI, and he blamed Silicon Valley’s pet philosophy, effective altruism, for those delusions. 

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“There's an unseen force driving the narrative around AI safety, and it's really this millenarian doomsday cult meets messianic complex called effective altruism,” Sankar said. That philosophy prioritizes making the most effective decisions that benefit the most humans - like utilitarianism on steroids - and it tends to take a long-term approach to things. That’s where AI comes in: Effective altruists are ostensibly focused on ensuring AI systems are built in a way that will best benefit humanity. 

That focus has been a key reason why so much AI doomerism has come out of Silicon Valley too: If we’re going to build safe AI, says the effective altruist, we have to make sure that we consider all the risks. 

“There's only really roughly 2,000 AI researchers in America, and the vast majority of them believe in this sort of worldview around effective altruism,” Sankar noted. The Palantir CTO seems to believe, like many effective altruism critics, that all the doomsday scenarios and far-fetched risks being posited by the EA AI crowd are less technical critiques and more like theological ones. 

“I think there's a profound truth to Pascal's saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart,” Sankar said, “and it's important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI.” 

Smoking as a bet that the machine god will save them from cancer, therefore, is akin to the ascetic’s endurance of physical pain or trauma in the hopes God will heal them or see them safely through their torment. 

From a more practical perspective, this isn’t exactly a great idea, as one former cancer researcher who spoke to The Register told us. 

“Good luck to them with this approach,” the researcher, who declined to be named, opined. “Even more so, good luck to their non-smoking friends and family taking in their passive smoke.” 

Taking up smoking in the hopes of a cure may not be a wise idea when one considers the timeline needed to develop a cancer drug, much less a cancer cure. 

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"Even with AI, developing and introducing a new cancer drug into any of the world's health systems can take several years,” the researcher explained. “Even then we wouldn't know whether or not resistance to the drug would develop in the tumors.”

The ability of AI to discover drugs and medical treatments has been much hyped - Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis even predicted last year that 2025 would be the year humans started popping AI-designed pills. That hasn’t happened yet, and there’s no real indication it will anytime soon. 

In other words, the likelihood that AI is going to kill us all is ridiculously overblown. The actual casualties, it seems, are more likely to be the AI bros giving themselves cancer as a show of faith in their machine god.  ®