Researchers cig-nal their faith in AI by taking up smoking

Silicon Valley’s AI bros have supposedly found a new way to signal to those around them how committed they are to their industry: Take up smoking despite the risk of cancer, because they expect bots to develop a cure … any day now. At least, that’s the claim Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar made in a recent interview on CBS's Face the Nation. In trying to explain what he described as a doomsday cult surrounding effective altruism, whose adherents include some AI researchers who believe the technology could bring about a utopia, Sankar claimed smoking has become a way for researchers to demonstrate their faith in the tech. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said to the confusion of host Margaret Brennan. Those researchers “believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer, I'm showing you my chips are all in,” Sankar explained. …