Tristan Harris

Hey everyone, and welcome to Your Undivided Attention.

This is Tristan Harris.

One of the most common arguments you hear from people racing to super intelligent AI is that it'll be able to cure cancer.

It's incredibly powerful.

It will do all these wonderful things like, you know, will help us cure cancer.

It may help us to eradicate tropical diseases.

We are working to build tools that one day can help us make new discoveries and address some of humanity's biggest challenges, like climate change and curing cancer.

I think one day maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI.

not help with cancer, not improve treatment, but cure cancer.

Now, that's obviously an incredibly powerful and seductive promise.

And everybody listening to this right now likely knows someone who's died of cancer.

It kills almost 10 million people per year.

I lost my mother to cancer in 2018.

This is a very personal topic.

And that's why this promise is so potent and why we need to examine it.

Because if the technology really can cure cancer, then anyone who stands in the way of it, anyone who wants to slow it down, even because of the serious risks, is essentially letting people die.

This is the idea of the invisible graveyard you hear about from the accelerationists.

Think of all the people that we might be able to save by racing forward.

In fact, the biggest risk is not going fast enough, they argue.

But what if it isn't actually capable of solving cancer in the way it's been described?