AI Will Cure Cancer, So I'll Just Keep Smoking in the Meantime

Saw a headline on r/artificial this morning that made me put my coffee down for a second. Apparently a Palantir exec reckons AI researchers are taking up smoking again, on the logic that AI will cure cancer before it gets around to killing them. I read it twice to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood. I hadn’t.

Now, I don’t know how widespread this actually is, and I’m deeply suspicious of any trend story that starts with “AI researchers are doing X” when X sounds like something a guy said once at a dinner party in Palo Alto. But the comments underneath the post were the good part, as they often are. One bloke, a former smoker, laid out the actual mechanism better than the headline ever could: nicotine’s a nootropic, vaping stops hitting the way it used to, someone tries an actual cigarette and it lands like a freight train, and suddenly there’s a social club out the back of the office where all the smart, stressed people gather to feel good together. The cancer justification comes later. It’s the story you tell yourself after the addiction’s already moved in and made itself comfortable.

That rings true to me, and not because I’ve ever smoked. It’s the same pattern as every bad habit I’ve watched friends talk themselves into and out of over twenty years. Nobody starts with the rational decision. The rational decision gets built afterwards, as scaffolding, so the thing you’re already doing feels like a choice instead of a compulsion. “I only drink on weekends.” “I only check work email at dinner because the client’s in a different time zone.” “I’ll definitely stop once this project’s done.” We’re extremely good at this. It’s one of the more human things about us, and AI hasn’t changed that one bit, it’s just given us a shinier excuse to hang off.

There’s a real tension sitting underneath the joke, though, and it’s one I think about a fair bit given what I do for a living. I’m genuinely excited about what AI might do in medicine. Protein folding, drug discovery, picking up things in scans that a tired radiologist at the end of a double shift might miss, that’s not hype, that’s already happening in smaller ways. And I also think the amount of unearned confidence currently floating around AI circles is getting dangerous, in the sense that smart people are starting to treat “AI will probably figure it out eventually” as a substitute for “I should probably not do the thing that gives me cancer.” Both of those things are true at once and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

I had a moment a few years back that’s stuck with me. My father-in-law, lifelong smoker, got the diagnosis everyone dreads, and the oncologist told him flatly that the treatments available today were nothing like what they’d have been even a decade earlier. That was real progress, hard won, built on decades of unglamorous research by people who weren’t betting on a future breakthrough to bail them out. He still went through chemo. It still took the better part of two years off him. No future miracle retroactively un-does the damage you’re doing today. That’s the bit the smoking justification quietly skips over: even in the extremely generous scenario where AI delivers a genuine cure within a researcher’s lifetime, the years between now and then still happen to your lungs, your blood vessels, your actual body. Someone in the thread mentioned eye surgery from a nicotine-related vascular issue that has nothing to do with cancer at all. Quality of life doesn’t wait around for a model to get better.

I don’t think this is really a story about AI. It’s a story about how we’ve always done this, dressing up bad decisions in the language of whatever feels most futuristic at the time. People smoked through the fifties because doctors in adverts told them it was good for digestion. People now vape because an app told them it’s basically water vapour. The particular technology changes, the shape of the self-deception doesn’t.

None of which means I think the Anthropic enzyme discovery or the protein folding work or any of the genuinely impressive medical AI stuff is nonsense, because it isn’t. I just think there’s a difference between being excited about where a field might land in fifteen years and using that excitement as a permission slip for what you do to yourself tonight. One of the commenters put it better than I could: it’s all layers of stupid. Fair enough. But I’d rather be cautiously hopeful about the medicine and still put the cigarette down, than place a bet on the future that my own lungs have to cover.