One of the most common arguments you hear from company executives racing to develop super-intelligent AI is that it will cure cancer. It’s an incredibly powerful and seductive promise.

If superintelligent AI really can cure cancer, then anyone who stands in the way of it, anyone who wants to slow it down — even because of its serious risks — is essentially letting people die. In fact, the biggest risk would be going too slowly. But what if a superintelligent AI isn’t actually capable of solving cancer in the way it's been described? What if we're being sold a false promise to justify a dangerous race?

That’s exactly what our guest this week argues is happening. Dr. Emilia Javorsky is a physician, public health researcher, and director of the Futures Program at the Future of Life Institute. She's worked across scientific research, clinical trials, tech startups, and AI policy. Emilia recently wrote a paper titled “How AI Can and Can't Cure Cancer,” in which she argues that the promise of superintelligence curing cancer falls apart under scrutiny.

Emilia lost a parent to cancer, so her criticism of this promise comes from a place of real concern, not cynicism. It also comes from her belief that AI can be really revolutionary for medicine, if we build it the right way.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_ and subscribe to our Substack.

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CLARIFICATIONS:

• Emilia’s claim that “the doubling rate of medical knowledge has gone from 50 years in the 1950s down to 73 days” comes from an oft-cited 2011 paper from the NIH. However, this paper does not include any methodology for arriving at this claim.
• Emilia stated that we have yet to cure any complex, chronic disease in humans. However, we have been able to cure Hepatitis C, which is considered a complex infectious disease, and we have managed to effectively cure some types of Leukemia

Correction: Tristan incorrectly paraphrased a quote from Charlie Munger about incentives. The actual quote is “The basic rule of incentives is you get what you were owed for. So if you have a dumb incentive system, you get dumb outcomes."

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Our guest this week is David Dalrymple, who goes by Davidad. Davidad is one of the world's foremost and early researchers of AI “alignment:" how we get AI systems to act the way we want them to.

In order to do that, Davidad has taken on the strange role of being like a therapist to AI systems. He interrogates why they say and do the things that they do, probing them, asking them questions, analyzing their answers. And what he’s come to realize is that AI models have really different ways of seeing the world than people do. They have these quirky, confusing, and sometimes concerning behaviors, especially when you ask things like: what does an AI model understand about itself?

In this episode, we’re going to hear from Davidad about his research, how it’s changed the way he thinks about AI, and what his findings mean for how we build, deploy, and use AI products. His conclusions are unconventional, controversial — and worth grappling with as AI reshapes our world.

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Corrections:

• When we recorded this episode, Davidad was Program Director at UK ARIA. In April, 2026 he started his own alignment initiative.
• Davidad said that Anthropic started doing "constitutional AI at scale” in 2024 but they first pioneered constitutional AI in 2022.
• Davidad said that the “lifespan of an AI mind…is hours at most of a conversation.” He is correct that most conversations with an AI last only a few minutes but since context windows are measured in tokens, not time, you can't set an upward time limit.

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Today on the show, we’re bringing you a recent conversation Tristan and Aza had with Oprah Winfrey on her podcast, The Oprah Podcast, taped in front of a live studio audience.

Tristan and Aza first met Oprah as guests on her 2024 special, "AI and the Future of Us," which offered an introduction to the AI Dilemma. This conversation goes much deeper, giving a full picture of the profoundly anti-human future that our current path on AI is moving us toward — and what we can do to steer away from it.

Tristan and Aza also did a Q+A with the audience, moderated by Oprah. Audience members shared their own experiences with AI and asked incisive, critical questions that you might have yourself.

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