The AI industry itself hasn't yet fully delivered all of the benefits, and I wanted you to comment on that. Do you think it's still in the process of delivering those benefits?
Yeah. So, you know, I think one of the unfortunate things is this technology has many potential benefits, but there is a dynamic where sometimes the harms, the things that go wrong, for example, you know, people who have been convinced to commit suicide via AI, those things happen quickly. Whereas the benefits like curing cancer, those things take years, right? You have to develop a breakthrough in biology, then you have to, you know, develop a drug candidate, then you have to put it through clinical trials, right? It's, you know, I used to be a research biologist and it takes many years for these things to happen. And we are working on how to speed that up, right? We recently bought a small biotech company that specializes in doing drug design and drug selection with AI. So the hope is a few years from now, you know, some new drugs for cancer or for Alzheimer's or for heart disease, you know, will come out of that effort. But we're just at the beginning of it. But because of what you said, because of this dynamic that you said, which is, you know, people right now, you know, the harms may be more visible than the benefits. So when we start seeing the benefits of AI through all of the health advances, when we start actually seeing that, the narrative then begins to change.
And more importantly, it's just going to be a wonderful world. Like at the end of the day, who cares about the narrative? We want to actually help people, right?
That's right. Okay. So that's what I want you to do for us today. Paint the best picture and also tell us what we can expect if there is the worst picture. So you have children and I was thinking about it this morning. Your children will, first of all, I don't even know you do what you do, and your children are going to grow up in a world where there was always AI and their mom was a part of that. So when you think of the best possible world and what that world offers your children, what do you see?
So my kids are almost five and almost one. And so I think you're completely right. They're never going to know a world where artificial intelligence is not part of it. Right. Just like kids born in the early 2000s never knew the world before the internet.
That's right. But, you know, I think there is a world and it sounds, you know, I think to Daria's point, it sounds almost like a little bit fanciful or unlikely when we talk about it this way, but I think it is possible with artificial intelligence that our kids will grow up in a world where there's a class of diseases that feel very common to everybody sitting here that they'll just never have experienced or known about. And those might be very common diseases. There might be types of cancer that are just simply gone. We've just simply cured them. It could be all forms of cancer that are eventually gone and cured. There could be, you know, new forms of drug discovery that we haven't even, we don't even know what they are yet. But that it's a faster iteration loop for diagnosing an illness that's unusual, rare, emerging, and just knocking it out and saying, 'Human beings get to live a much healthier, longer, more fulfilling life because we've been able to conquer so many of the maladies that have plagued humanity for millennia.'
Okay, you see that for medicine. What else do you see?
I also see a world honestly that looks very different in terms of how we communicate, how we talk, how we relate to one another.
Will we even be thinking anymore? Will there be a need to think?
So I think this one is subtle and is one of the things we need to get exactly right. Right. Because having these kind of smart entities around, it's very powerful, but it can go in different directions. Right. You can surrender your thought to these entities.
Claude can give me these good questions.
But it can also empower you. Like the way I think we think about the positive version of this is there's an angel on your shoulder that's telling you how to live your life in the best way that you can live it, right? You know, so there's two contrasting visions, right? The bad vision is you get drawn in and you spend all your time talking to the thing. You kind of turn inward.
What do you think of people falling in love with it now?
I think that's a bad idea.
I agree. [laughter] I just interviewed Esther Perel, one of the great communicators in helping people in relationships, and she said she did her first consultation with a man who was in love with his AI.
And they are, again, if designed in the wrong way, they are totally compelling enough for that to happen, or if they're not, they will be soon. So that is absolutely a real danger. But you know...
And you think that's a danger.
