What do AI and Cancer have in common?

A trade off in obsolescence: You can have my words in exchange for a cure

Photo by National Cancer Institute via Unsplash

Back at it before AI takes it all away. Just kidding. Maybe? Thanks to

Stacy Wentworth, M.D.

for kindly nudging me into getting this stack back on its feet. But as always, I appreciate everyone reading whatever I write, whenever I write it.

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It all started when my hematologist jokingly told me that I was a “trendy” patient. In ALL (leukemia) circles I had ridden the wave of “popular” therapies, beginning with a cord blood transplant circa 2016, then on to the new it thing, a haplo transplant circa 2018, and now I am hopefully riding a CAR-T cell infusion into leukemia vibe retirement — because I certainly feel like I am aging out of chasing trends.

Beyond the realms of illness, these days I can’t whisper the word trend without either thinking of baggy jeans returning from my middle school years or the headline domination of Artificial Intelligence. Both have created a mix of curiosity and horror in me, though with AI, I admittedly lean more towards the later. But I remain intrigued that one day I will be able to ask Chad GPT (my low brow humor AI agent pseudonym) to diagnose a new mole so he can deliver the news that I am, once again, worried about nothing.

However, whereas the AI of my imagination stocked my fridge and flew me to other galaxies (all things AI evangelists say will happen soon enough), we have instead entered the era of mass job replacement and fever dream Google Veo 3 videos, where the tenets of invention have seemingly side-stepped singular answers to “why” with “because we can.” I know, I know, “it’s just a tool” and the killer use case will all come into focus soon. Until then the admittedly few videos I watched as “research” all ended with someone trying to teach me how to use AI to generate unique, daily automated LinkedIn posts, so… That explains a lot about LinkedIn.

But as a writer, the threat feels extant mostly because writing is so hard and Chad makes it look so easy. Answers to prompts dance into existence in perfect sci-fi synchronicity, just like how I always imagined they would as a kid. The phrasing, the analysis, it’s like a magic trick. The algorithm’s slight of hand in producing so much from so little has overwhelmed us, and for good reason. We know how long and hard it would have taken to make or research something — and so if it comes with a few shortcuts or flubs here and there, they are forgivable enough to buy us into further frictionless thinking. I mean, I’ve written this over the course of multiple days and this is what Chad gave me in thirty seconds:

But the friction is important. Deep down I know that there is something earned in the patience of sitting down, getting up, quitting, restarting, rewriting, and rethinking this piece. And besides the time-tested benefits of just stopping to f****** think for a second, Silicon Valley’s strategy of “move fast and break things” doesn’t really hold up in the world of medicine when humans are the things that are broken.

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A cursory search on the benefits of AI and cancer led to an illuminating article by the Cancer Research Institute that goes long on the ways in which AI’s ability to crunch all that medical data have led to breakthroughs and promise even more. Thankfully, applying the tools of AI to cancer and its many uses for collection and prediction have lifted my spirits more than seemingly everything else that has been shown to us.

In terms of answers, in the realm of sickness there have been so many times when a magic mirror would have been useful for my hurried queries. Detailed and personalized symptom breakdowns, automated appointment scheduling, or even a Chad to throw my forgotten questions at after a doctor’s lightning rounds would have been nice. Or, even better, predictive modeling that my cord blood transplant wouldn’t hold. Or, better yet, a pathway to a cure. A cure which is increasingly looking like a plural — “cures,” tailored silver bullets patchworked together to match diagnosis with a “mab” or targeted therapy that gets it all done.

Amazingly, yeah, that all seems like something this new horizon of AI could do.

But similar to AI targeting my writerly existence, it’s interesting to think of AI making cancer obsolete. I don’t think any part of the “doing” of cancer is inherently worth it, but like any arduous or difficult task, for better or worse, something often comes of it, foremost to my mind being gratitude. Even less difficult but strenuous tasks like a long run or the patience to see an intricate project through offer a level of satisfaction that nowadays feels like an arcane act of dopamine summoning compared to the whack-a-mole indulgences we get fed to us lottery-machine-style by the screens we inhabit. And I personally know that the gratitude I have towards ChadGPT for spitting out every possible iteration of my incessant questioning hardly evokes a feeling of gratitude, but rather that of an impatient autocrat snapping their fingers until the right delicacy is delivered directly under their nose.

These things revolve around time and patience and the sometimes laughable idea that AI is all about saving us time — and while I could snipe a joke at what we’re actually doing with this earned time while Chad toils quickly, I also know that time is the one resource cancer patients could always use more of. So maybe this is a larger question of how I am spending mine.

Granted, writing will never die. In fact, if we really extrapolate and go full sci-fi, it probably has a better chance of survival than illness. In the binary of science and humanities, I like to bargain with myself and believe there to be a finite number of biological problems — whereas the human soul is far messier. I eagerly await the joint utopia that comes with a world free of cancer and mindless technical tasks, but I suppose I am begrudgingly willing to settle for one without cancer while I… I don’t know what I’ll be doing. Walking the Nvidia computer processor fields like a farmer with a fan, making sure our overlords don’t overheat?

But here AI and a cure for cancer are held together by the loose idea of a promise. With the ultimate outcome of both once positioned as near-mythical accomplishments, and their invention signifying a future that has finally arrived, I have to pause my hating on a machine being better than me to wonder if maybe in the end I should be rooting for the tradeoff.

Because while I turn my nose up at the idea of AI’s takeover of the creative arts, if it also heralds in the age of cures for cancer, I would never want to fall into a stolen valor trap where I deride a generation of people who never have to know the pain of the disease. I will happily send this substack to the Library of Congress or Smithsonian (if they will exist after this hell-on-earth Groundhog’s Day administration) as evidence of a past existence.

Medicine is nothing without progress and culture moves whether I like it or not. Maybe it’s a good lesson to have one thing I love and one thing I hate in the crosshairs of The Next Big Thing. It is a reminder that self-preservation is natural but still ultimately self-serving, and while it’s easy to fixate on what could be lost, (chief amongst them any idea of what is even real anymore) there are always, hopefully, things we can’t see that could be gained.

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