Dr. Emilia Javorsky

I think this is a false choice we're forced to make quite often in the discourse.

It's like we either get our cancer cures and then we have to take on the risks of unemployment, extinction, X, Y, and Z. There's another path here where we get our cancer cures and we don't take that on, right?

Like there's a different option on the table that I think often kind of gets pushed aside.

Thank you so much for having me, Tristan.

Yeah.

So when we hear the promise of AI in cancer, it triggers in all of us a personal experience because all of our lives have been touched by some sort of loss to cancer.

And for me, it was deeply personal that I lost my father to cancer.

I lost my father to cancer over a decade ago.

And when I sat down to write this essay and really think about examining the ASI to cure cancer promise, I went back through the medical literature to see how much progress had been made since the time my father passed to where we are today.

And the reality is the survival rate is almost exactly the same as it was over a decade ago.

And so the problem of progress in oncology is probably one of the most urgent of our time and one of the most noble things we can deploy capital in service of solving and our talent in service of solving.

But I think it's really important to examine whether putting that capital into a race to superintelligence is the best way to save the lives of our loved ones.

Yeah.

So in addition to the personal experience with loss and cancer, I

having a background as a clinician and having gone to medical school, you also experience it from the other side, the frustration of providers about how limited of a toolkit they have to actually help people and encountering it sort of over and over again, day in and day out, having to deliver news of loss to families.

And so for me, this is deeply personal to me, both in terms of my life, but also in terms of my career.

And also in sort of a parallel hat that I've worn in this AI policy conversation for the better part of a decade now, have seen these two worlds, which is biomedical innovation and the ASI race.

And to me, hearing over and over and over again, AI is going to cure cancer.

Like we must build ASI because it's going to cure cancer.

And yet that promise going entirely unexamined, just kind of being taken at face value that if we want to save lives and if we want to cure cancer, that this is the thing that we have to do.