Cancer Culture

AI may soon cure disease but it won’t cure the decisions causing disease. The Federal Reserve and inflation work the same way.

The CEO of Google’s AI lab, DeepMind, was interviewed about how AI is speeding up drug development and the mapping of protein structures. He is excited about how AI can map proteins (the building blocks of life) in minutes, and drug development could be reduced to just mere weeks. Before AI invaded the world, this used to take years.

Before I go any further, I will go ahead and acknowledge that any criticism from me of him is like me criticizing Steph Curry’s shooting form.

But I am not criticizing him. Instead, I am challenging the game we are all playing.

In the interview he makes the hopeful statement that one day it may be possible to cure all disease. The power and efficiency of AI is making this a reasonable expectation. However, another intelligent investor who follows this space stated that “curing disease” does not actually mean it is cured. It just means that with the help of these drugs, diseases like cancer, will not kill you anymore. Instead, you are able to manage it and live with it.

This is good news, of course. But the focus is wrong.

Remember the old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”? Why not use AI to figure out how to prevent all these diseases? Maybe that’s because it is more profitable to harness AI to create more medicines to manage our diseases instead.

The goal and expectation with AI is not to cure many of these diseases, like how the Polio vaccine basically eradicated polio. They’re not going to cure cancer. They’re going to manage it. We will still have cancer, but with enough medication, technology, and intervention, we’ll be able to function—maybe even live a long life—while the disease remains in your body.

That’s not healing. That’s survival with a mask on.

And that’s exactly what our monetary system does.

AI in medicine and central banks in economics both promise “cures” but both systems are actually designed to manage symptoms, not eliminate causes.

Symptom Management vs. Root Healing

I joke (sort of) about how much Brazilians love tattoos - it is on another level. One of their favorites is “faith”, and they enjoy placing it on the side of their neck. Oddly enough, I’ve never seen anyone with a “repent” tattoo.

Similarly, in medicine and in money, we love strategies that avoid repentance. We want comfort without change, relief without responsibility, and quality of life without transformation.

The pharmaceutical industry exists to enable those preferences. AI-enabled “cancer cures” are shaping up to be symptom-management systems that allow you to live with the disease instead of eliminating the cause. We already do it now, so why would that change? The new technology is in the hands of people who have the same mindset.

In the same way, modern economics allows us to live with the disease of inflation, debt, and bad policy—but never confront the cause. The system is designed to accommodate dysfunction, perhaps perpetuate it, not heal it.

Cancer Culture

Inflation works exactly like a chronic illness. It’s invisible and grows slowly, degrading quality of life. Although it seems to appear suddenly, generally it is caused by long-term bad habits, fueled by denial and avoidance. When this continues long enough it can kill a person and an economy.

What do central banks do? They “treat” inflation by printing more money, lowering interest rates, or manipulating the standards. Ironically, these are the very things causing the disease in the first place. Central banks create inflation and then sell us their cure. This is like the big tobacco companies also owning the drug companies who treat lung cancer. Or like treating lung cancer by giving the patient a cleaner brand of cigarettes.

Our society increasingly prefers convenience, shortcuts, distractions, and avoiding responsibility and consequences. We have bad diets (SAD), bad sleep, and bad stress management. Our environments are often toxic, we have sedentary lifestyles, and we’re addicted to synthetic foods.

These things create disease.

Likewise, we have bad monetary policy which produces bad incentives. This creates a culture of debt and toxic spending habits (Black Friday!). And to top it all off, we’re clueless because no one teaches financial literacy.

These things allow inflation to grow like cancer.

In both cases, the system doesn’t want you healthy. The system wants you stable enough to function, dependent enough to stay plugged in, and too ignorant to revolt. Keep chasing that genetically modified carrot-on-a-stick, covered with something resembling chocolate.

Prevention vs. Intervention

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

At the risk of over-generalizing, every major health crisis and every major financial crisis has the same root cause: we chose comfort and convenience today instead of discipline and responsibility yesterday.

We want a pill instead of lifestyle change. We want easy money instead of financial discipline. We want favorable policies instead of principles, and band-aids instead of repentance.

The solution is taking responsibility for your situation, making hard choices, and changing bad habits one at a time. This is prevention. You may get criticized or questioned, but that will mostly come from people who don’t have the awareness or courage to realize they’re being played by this fiat-money game.

In discussing all this, I am attempting to expose something deeper than money, medicine and food. I am trying to expose something moral: we want healing without holiness. We want prosperity without stewardship. We want blessing without obedience. We want resurrection without repentance.

Once again, this shows the relevance of Jesus Christ. His mission was not symptom management. He offers rebirth and transformation, not coping.

The Real Cure

Just like true cancer and disease prevention requires healthy food, discipline, knowledge, humility, self-denial and long-term commitment, true economic health requires honest money, knowledge, discipline, personal responsibility, and a low time-preference.

Likewise, spiritual health requires knowledge, honesty, repentance, obedience and ongoing cooperation with God.

AI-enhanced pharmaceuticals may give us a world where people live better and longer lives with cancer and other diseases. Modern economics gives us a world where people live with inflation. But neither system is dealing with the root problem. They’re not curing the disease.

In fact, they are enabling it, helping you survive in it, and profiting off your survival. Until we address the root, the system will keep selling and celebrating more expensive treatments for the same old sickness.

The question isn’t whether AI can manage our diseases or whether central banks can manage our inflation. The question is: will we ever address the decisions that create them?

The painful symptoms we suffer as individuals and communities would, in large part, be eradicated if we would adopt a mindset and lifestyle defined and managed by what Jesus taught and empowers us to live.

The solution is compressed into this one line by Jesus: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.”