A.I. Researchers Have Started Smoking Because They Believe Their Inventions Will Cure Cancer Anyway

An exchange from October 11th’s episode of CBS’s “Face The Nation” between Margaret Brennan and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, brought to my attention by John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

Shyam Sankar: You know, I take — I think there’s a profound truth to Pascal’s saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart, 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. And I mean, there’s so many interesting stories around this. Like, for example, so many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI. I believe so much — (CROSSTALK)

Margaret Brennan: What? That makes no sense. What do you think —

Shyam Sankar: I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will — I’m showing you my chips are all in. So there is kind of this mass psychosis, social delusion around it, and I think it’s getting in the way of actually what is happening with AI.

John Gruber’s take is that these people are just delusional, way too high on their own supply. He’s probably correct, and in that case, god help us because these lunatics are the ones catapulting us into the A.I. future.

My cynical brain wonders if the people who have started smoking have done so not because they believe they’re creating something that will cure cancer by the time they could develop it as a result of smoking, but because they believe A.I. may well have destroyed us all before they could develop said cancer, and they just want to have a pack of cigs around to take the edge off their stress-filled final years.