Some AI researchers have started smoking to demonstrate their confidence that artificial intelligence will cure cancer, Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar told CBS, describing such behaviour as part of what he called “social delusion” in Silicon Valley.
“So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said.
He characterised their reasoning as: “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.”
“Many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI,” he said.
Sankar described these attitudes as “mass psychosis” and “social delusion”, arguing that they could be “getting in the way of actually what is happening with AI.”
His comments come amid predictions from prominent technology executives that AI could accelerate medical discoveries. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has said the technology could help find cures for most diseases, including cancers, within five to 15 years. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis has also discussed AI’s potential to advance treatments.
Sankar questioned the way the industry frames AI’s wider impact, pointing to two competing narratives: that the technology “is going to end humanity” or that it will create a “utopia”.
Despite their opposing conclusions, he argued, both narratives leave people with little influence over the outcome.
“So at first blush, this seems contradictory, but it has one thing in common, which is that you, as a human, have no agency,” he said.
Describing the outlook he was criticising, Sankar added: “The machine god is going to decide the future, and only perhaps a small number of us can try to avoid the horrible outcome.”
He rejected that view, saying people retain substantial control over how AI is developed and deployed. The focus on inevitable catastrophe or salvation, he argued, obscures decisions that humans can make about the technology’s use.
“And I think it obfuscates the more profound reality that we have a huge amount of human agency over how we're going to use this technology to deliver the outcomes the American people expect,” Sankar said.
