Bill Maher Has High Hopes for AI Curing All Cancers: ‘Don’t See Why It Couldn’t’ | Video
Don’t count Bill Maher among the naysayers of artificial intelligence. On the contrary, the comedian and HBO show host said on his podcast he thinks AI can cure cancer.
And not one type of cancer, Maher insists — all cancers.
Maher, speaking to the disgraced former cyclist Lance Armstrong during “Club Random,” was going in on his oft-treaded line of debate in wondering why he shouldn’t question the wisdom and credibility of medical professionals and medical science.
“You can’t convince me that it’s a good idea to sit there and say, ‘Well, we are the government officials and we have the white lab coats and we’re just saying this — don’t ask any questions’ — when you haven’t even figured out cancer or Parkinson’s or MS or thousands of things,” Maher said to Armstrong, who overcame testicular cancer in his 20s.
“There can’t be so many things in medicine that they either don’t know or have reversed themselves and then tell me when something new comes along, ‘No debate. If you debate it, you’re going against The Science,” Maher continued, video of which you can watch at the top of this file. “There is no The in science. We have to always debate it because we don’t know. And you’re not good at it. You haven’t proved yourself to be good at it. Cure cancer and come back and talk to me about blindly following you.”
“I would probably defend them a little,” Armstrong said. “It’s been 27 years and I’m sitting here and I feel better than ever. But to that point, cancer is one word. Cancer is hundreds of diseases. Right? So I’m sitting here right now. I’m sure you have an aunt or a neighbor or a friend who’s surviving breast cancer or somebody who’s survived prostate cancer. These are all different diseases. We get tricked by looking at the one word.
“And there will not be a moonshot, here,” Armstrong added. “Like, nobody’s coming in tomorrow going, ‘AI just cured cancer.’ It’s not happening. We have to go disease by disease by disease.”
But Maher disagreed.
“I don’t think it’s as pessimistic as you paint it. I think that AI could do that,” Maher said.
“That would be great,” Armstrong said.
“I don’t see why it couldn’t if it is at this level, where it,” Maher said without completing his thought. “But we don’t know. I definitely think that’s something to have a lot of hope for. I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be the last guy who didn’t benefit from the cure for death. You know like, ‘Ah, if we did this one day earlier we could have saved Bill Maher. But he died and then we got the cure on a Thursday.”
Watch Maher’s full hour-plus interview with Armstrong at the top of this post.
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