This month, on CBS's Face the Nation, Palantir's chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, told a strange story. "So many researchers have started smoking," he said, "as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI. The logic runs like this. You only light a cigarette if you expect the damage not to matter, and the damage only stops mattering if machines fix human biology before the bill comes due.
Sankar told the story as a warning. He called the mood in Silicon Valley a "mass psychosis," and he offered no evidence for the smoking claim.
The bet underneath it still deserves a hearing. The people making it run the largest AI labs on Earth, and this publication lives on long horizons. Bitcoin asks its holders to think in decades. This essay asks what happens to a saver's arithmetic if the decades stop running out.
In January 2025, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, called a doubling of the human lifespan "not at all crazy" as a century's work for biology.
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