AI: GOD‑LIKE SAVIOR OR A MONKEY WITH A GRENADE? — THE BRUTAL CHOICE: CANCER OR EDUCATION.

Let’s be blunt. We’re at the helm of the most powerful technology since the invention of the nuclear reactor — and we’re acting like a monkey with a grenade. The grenade is artificial intelligence; the monkey is us, chasing every fleeting desire and unable to look past our own noses.

While you read this post — probably polished by an AI that chose its words so you wouldn’t fall asleep — somewhere in the world someone is dying of cancer. Somewhere else, a child whose talent could flip the universe is being dulled by an education system that belongs in a museum of failures.

And our so‑called “almighty” AI? Do you know what it’s busy with? No — not curing cancer. It’s hard at work generating the next masterpiece: “5 ways to boost your personal brand on LinkedIn while you sip your turmeric latte.” God, when will this stop?

Prometheus or Procrustes?

Imagine a supercomputer the size of a planet. Its brain is a neural network so complex even its creators don’t fully understand how it conjures wonders. But it has only one outlet. You can’t plug in an infinite medical simulator and, at the same time, run a global education platform at full throttle. You must choose.

Go all‑in on Medicine — an aggressive assault on death.
What do we get? We throw AI’s full force at decoding cancer biology, modeling proteins, and discovering drugs. Progress won’t be linear — it will be explosive. What might have taken fifty years could be done in five.

What do we lose? Billions will remain mired in an intellectual swamp. Ignorance breeds war, tyranny and a new dark age. We could make a cure for cancer — and also create a world where only the privileged get it, while the rest, embittered and uneducated, torch the labs.

Great — we cure cancer. Then we starve in a world run by fools because AI was too busy to optimize agriculture. Or, more likely, those the AI never taught critical thinking will blow us up.

As Nick Bostrom observed: “A machine that exceeds human intelligence could be either the last invention mankind ever needs, or the greatest.” Right now we’re stubbornly heading toward the first option, frittering its power on nonsense.

Go all‑in on Education — an intellectual elevator for billions.
What do we get? A personal AI tutor for every human on Earth — from a Mongolian shepherd to a homeless person in New York. Harvard‑ and MIT‑level learning available at a click. A generation of geniuses.

What do we lose? Meanwhile, people continue to die from diseases we could potentially cure. We produce a legion of educated, healthy—and still mortal—humans who will age and fall ill because we postponed the medical breakthrough.

A beautiful future: everyone speaks perfect English, quotes Kant and understands quantum mechanics — while their children die of leukemia we could have beaten if AI hadn’t been busy teaching philosophy.

Steve Jobs, early in his illness, said: “The biggest mistake is thinking you have time.” The same applies to humanity. We don’t have time to dilly‑dally. Every day of delay in the fight against cancer is thousands of lost lives.

Diffusing the power: the path to mediocrity?
The alternative is compromise, and compromise is cowardice. Let’s do a little for medicine, a little for education, some for climate models — and of course reserve gigawatts to refine algorithms for targeted ad harassment.

The result? Slow, agonizing progress across the board. Cancer improves by 5% every ten years. Education reaches an extra 50 million people a year. It’s like trying to put out the Notre‑Dame fire with a garden hose. Heroic? Maybe. Effective? Hardly.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold already revolutionized biology by predicting the structures of nearly all known proteins — a problem once considered unsolvable for decades solved in years. That’s not diffusion. That’s a precision strike of titanic force. Imagine if Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and other giants had thrown their full weight behind medical projects like that. We’d be living in a different world today.

The quantum mirage: intellectual opium
“Quantum computers will fix it soon!” — a favorite excuse of slackers and dilettantes. It’s like telling a starving person: “Hold on, soon they’ll figure out how to synthesize food from air.” Yes, quantum computing is a dazzling prospect. It may render today’s dilemmas archaic. But “soon” — when is that? Ten years? Thirty? Fifty? People are dying now. Children aren’t learning now. Waiting for a quantum savior is strategic cowardice wrapped in false optimism.

Verdict: the cruel math of survival
So what do we do? Go all‑in. Put everything on one card. But which one?

This requires not emotion but cold, almost inhuman logic. Education is an investment in the future. Medicine is a rescue of the present. Yet the rescued present has no future without an educated generation. 

And vice versa.

Perhaps the answer is not choosing between them, but choosing the sequence. Build a hierarchy of threats.

Step 1: Eliminate existential threats. Disease is an existential threat for every human being. Devote 80% of AI power to defeating the biggest killers — cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, heart disease. Buy humanity time.

Step 2: With health secured, switch to intellect. With longer, healthier lives, we can pour the same 80% into education. Then a trained humanity will have the brains — and the time — to use them.

This is a brutal calculus. It means sacrificing one generation’s schooling to save lives and accelerate breakthroughs for all future generations. Politicians will be eaten alive for this; philosophers will condemn it in print. But it may be the only right choice.

Meanwhile, as we argue and scatter our forces, our titanic AI‑Prometheus keeps stealing not the fire of knowledge but cat photos and the perfect excuses for being late to work. Wake up. It’s time to decide whether we are gods or proto‑humans, and to act accordingly.

While we decide whether to save bodies or minds, AI has generated another million “Happy Monday” posts. Brilliant plan, humanity. Simply brilliant.