I’d Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast

On a fall afternoon 15 years ago, I met an idealistic researcher outside a Stanford coffee shop to discuss our shared dream: using AI to detect cancer. He had wiry hair, a penchant for talking with his hands, and a reputation for brilliance. He worked at a research lab that developed early screens for cancer; I, at 20, had just learned that I carried a mutation that conferred a very high risk of breast, ovarian, and other cancers. Over the following years, he offered guidance on how to enter his field, prepared me to apply for the scholarship that would fund my Ph.D., and warned me away from cancer-screening companies that made exaggerated claims.But from there our paths diverged. I became an AI professor. He co-founded Anthropic. My mentor was Dario Amodei, the man who leads one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. In a utopian 2024 essay titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” he predicted that superhuman AI—smarter than Nobel Prize winners, freely using computers, and collaborating with millions of copies of itself—could soon compress a century of scientific progress into a single decade, and potentially reduce cancer mortality by 95 percent.Which should sound pretty good to me. At 35, my cancer risks are catching up with me. A few weeks ago, surgeons removed my ovaries, instantly inducing menopause and destroying my ability to naturally bear children. By 40, the risk of breast cancer for carriers of my mutation rises to one in four, double the lifetime risk for the average woman. My mother, who also carries the mutation, was diagnosed with breast cancer at 45. Now would be a fabulous time in my life for a superintelligent AI to cure cancer.Why, then, do I find myself rooting for delays in the creation of this AI—hoping, in my heart of hearts, that GPT-6 will be a disappointment?Part of the answer is that, despite the extraordinary speed of AI development, I do not believe that AI is likely to cure cancer anytime soon—certainly not enough to bet my life on