OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman told an audience at a WSJ Tech event that artificial intelligence is on the verge of delivering major medical breakthroughs, and that death itself could eventually become a matter of personal choice.
Brockman said the field has long promised cures for disease, a claim that has circulated since ChatGPT’s launch, but argued AI is now close to making good on it. “Having cures for diseases is something that’s become also a trope in this field, but I think that you’re gonna see real delivery and real significant strides and impacts on biology, health, and curing of diseases over the next 12 months, 18 months,” he said.
He then went further, suggesting AI’s progress could eventually give people the option of whether to die at all. “I think that we all suffer, that the question of even just thinking about death becoming a choice. All of this is possible,” Brockman said.
Brockman isn’t alone in making these claims. Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar said last month that some AI researchers believe so strongly that AI will cure cancer that they’ve taken up smoking because of it. Sankar called the mindset “kind of this mass psychosis social delusion.”
Futurist Peter Diamandis made a similar prediction last year, pointing to 2030 as a turning point for human longevity. His advice was to simply survive long enough to benefit from coming breakthroughs, and not die “from something stupid” in the meantime. Diamandis has described a convergence of AI-driven technologies he calls “longevity escape velocity.”
Biohacker millionaire Bryan Johnson, known for his extensive anti-aging regimen, has said AI is among the technologies that could eventually mean no medical condition is presumed incurable. Elon Musk has made similar arguments, noting that the human body ages as one synchronized system — nobody, he points out, has an old left arm and a young right arm. Musk has said humans are “programmed to die,” but has suggested that programming could be changed to let people live significantly longer.
These predictions come alongside other recent AI developments. The co-founder of CentOS built a Linux-compatible kernel in just 11 days with AI handling most of the coding. An AI-developed drug appeared in a clinical trial to make patients biologically younger. And Anthropic’s Claude model, while attempting to solve the long-unproven Riemann hypothesis, didn’t crack it but produced an unexpected new finding along the way.
It’s worth noting that the same AI companies making these sweeping promises about curing disease and defeating death are simultaneously lobbying Washington for government regulation of their own industry — a dynamic that ought to give every American pause before buying into the hype.
