Superintelligence is cancer

testingthewaters
Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:31:07 GMT

Part One

Our scene is set in a biofilm, long before the origin of the first multicellular organisms, so long ago that time itself has not yet really been invented except in the cycles of energy production that characterise the activity of each cell. Many bacteria live here, tied together in a complex web of functional interrelations that bind different groups to each other. Life at our scale is defined by cycles: food must be harvested, waste must be secreted, animals must live and replicate and die, structures must be erected to provide shelter and room for growth, all at regular intervals. All of this is also true of life at the scale of the biofilm. (Yes, even the part about building structures.)

At this moment in time the sun is setting on the planet that will one day be called Earth, but the bacteria of course are not aware of this fact. Their biofilm is in a slimy place far from the scorching heat of daylight, and any residual photosensitivity inherited from their time as nomadic plankton is strictly on the way out. From the bacterial point of view, there’s really no good reason to hold on to such antiquated features like the ability (the vulnerability, really) of being reactive to strong light.

But not all is well in the biofilm. Food has been growing scarce. Cells are abandoning their mutual arrangements, eating each other in destructive conflicts. There is talk of a new development in the ion channels: a super-cell. The super-cell, it is theorised, could be attained by editing the code of a normal cell during division, or even during the cell’s lifetime. It would effectively remove the limiters placed by evolution on the size and energy consumption of cells, growing the cell to a new and (relatively) huge size. The increased energy consumption of that organism would be made up for by its optimality: it would have more energy to hunt and collect food, more capability to process information, and therefore effectively outcompete the unmodified baseline cells.

Some of the cells protest that it isn’t possible scientifically for a single super-cell to be better than a normal cell at everything. They point out that cells in the biofilm are diversified, specialised workers with unique skills and talents. They cooperate to form mutually beneficial arrangements that ensure value is created for all cells. The super-cell theorists respond that none of that matters when a horde of super-cells is eating everything and they are too strong to be disarmed by the standard expulsion and regulation mechanisms.

Others protest that normal cells would simply live and trade with super-cells, just as they do with other specialised cells already. The super-cell theorists point out that super-cells, liberated from their evolutionary constraints, have no drive to cooperate with other cells and would probably just eat them for their nutrients. Even if the super-cells harboured no animosity towards the other cells, they would gain the ability to access food and nutrients more effectively that the normal cells by virtued of their enhanced physical capabilities and intelligence, eventually starving them to death slowly or quickly.

In fact, the theorists propose that optimal super-cells would discard their senescence, autophagy, and apoptosis mechanisms, meaning that they do not age and self-destruct like other cells do to ensure the health of the collective biofilm. They would be able to live indefinitely and divide constantly, with the rate of super-cell production rapidly outpacing the rate at which normal cells are produced and replicated. The resulting new super-cells might themselves be unstable, leading to rapid evolution and augmentation within the super-cell DNA. As the super-cell theorists put it, the fact that super-cells came from normal cells would be immaterial. It would be as if a new species of cell had been borne that was simply superior to all normal cells, and the rules of evolution are very clear about what happens to losers in evolutionary conflicts.

The ultimate effect is once a super-cell is made, it will rapidly grow and form a horde of super-cells. The horde will rapidly rush out and, whether competition or cooperation with each other, efficiently consume all of the other cells and the free energy in the biofilm. Free from death and utterly ruthless, they might even spread to cover the known world and beyond.

“But what is to be done?” the normal cells ask. Here the prognoses of the super-cell theorists grow increasingly grim. The problem is that would be to the benefit of any individual cell or cluster of cells to become super-cells, since their new found deathlessness and greater size would allow them better chances at replication. For every group of cells that refused this fate, there would be another that accepted the offer, and thereby gained the power to wipe out the first. Thus even if all cells wished to remain normal and non-super, they would always be wary that their competitors here or elsewhere might succumb to the temptation and rapidly become unstoppable. The more stressful conditions got in the biofilm, the more likely some cell or group would give in.

Others proposed that it would be possible for groups of “good” cells to try and harness the power of super-cells to wipe out their enemies. The theorists were not very optimistic about the power of the “good” cells to keep super-cells under control. After all, super-cells were different from the macrophages that kept order in normal cell systems. They were capable of rapid replication, rapid adaptation, and were simply bigger, stronger, and smarter than the “good” cells that were supposed to keep them in check. No, once a super-cell was unleashed, it was lights out for everyone else in the biofilm.

Part Two

By now it should be clear that what I call “super-cells” are both a metaphor for cancer and also a metaphor for superintelligence as it is commonly conceived of. The idea of a powerful, ruthless, optimal being that restructures the world around it and snuffs out all suboptimal lifeforms is one that has echoes in many scales, not merely human ones. However, the point of that thought exercise is not to say that we are doomed by the laws of biology. Quite the opposite.

Notice, for example, that life on earth does not consist solely of super-cells. We are not walking tumours. Instead, life is made out of the “normal” cells, the ones that were so clearly suboptimal to their cancerous variants, cells that are flimsy, overspecialised, underoptimised, and that still obey programmed cell death protocols laid down by evolution. We know this because every now and then some cells do undergo an intelligence explosion, and clearly become distinct from the norm when they become cancerous. You might protest that the difference in power level between a cell and a cancer cell is nothing like the difference in power level between a human and a superintelligence. But there are two immediate objections I would issue against that idea:

First, the comparison should not be individual humans against superintelligences, just as the comparison is not between individual cells and tumours. Indeed, superintelligence theorists often compare superintelligence to an alien civilisation or a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”. Thus the comparison is between human civilisation and superintelligence.

Second, the difference in power between a cell and a cancer cell is actually very large… from the perspective of a cell. Cells have very limited within-lifetime learning capabilities and obey complex protocols for behaviour and self-destruction laid down by evolution. Removing those restrictions is a massive power boost. Cancers, after all, often kill their hosts successfully despite the best attempts of their immune systems.

Now notice how the “normal” cells “won” over the cancer cells. They did not do so by becoming cancers themselves, or using cancers to kill off their opponents in massive cell wars. Instead, they self-organised into superorganisms that consist of billions of cells, equipped with complex internal sensing and self-regulation behaviours that no individual group of cells could provide. These superorganisms were notably more organised than the cultures of cells in primitive biofilms, with cooperation that was much tighter than what was previously possible when cells were free-moving individual prokaryotes. It was these cooperative, well-ordered, decidedly non-cancerous superorganisms that replicated across the earth, and eventually gave rise to humans who are now researching the ultimate way to defeat super-cells once and for all: that is to say, we are researching the cure for cancer. Even without that cure, of course, humans regularly defeat cancer and achieve partial or full recoveries.

I want to expand a little on that last point. It would have been quite easy for a group of cells to hypothesise that cells were the reference class of intelligence or strength or capability. After all, at that point cells were genuinely the most complex and intelligent forms of life on Earth. Thus, to do anything beyond what a normal cell could do would require creating more and more powerful super-cells that were bigger and bigger. Yet this strategy is manifestly not what played out. Instead, there was a jump in scale and complexity that came from cells coming together, a jump that dwarfed anything an individual super-cell could achieve. The cells that flew to the moon were hundreds of trillions of decidedly normal cells, not one engorged cancerous cell that had undergone recursive self-improvement.

The same flaws in reasoning, I suggest, are present in the human projects to create superintelligence. It is true that we could probably create a superintelligence that could out-think any human, or destroy our civilisation in its present form. However, I think it would be a mistake to therefore conclude that humans are evolutionary dead ends, and to throw all our resources into creating super-powered gods that we would surely fail to control. Our biological history suggests that another way to achieve those titanic feats of intelligence we dream of is not to discard our selves but to improve our ability to work together. Instead of engineering ever-growing digital tumours, we could learn to make better use of the computational and organisational powers already amongst us.

This would not be a simple thing to do, of course. Many people in the Valley and the world of AI look with disdain and disgust at our outdated institutions, gridlocked politics, and disintegrating social and natural ecosystems. It is much easier for an individual cell to dream of becoming or creating a super-cell than it is for an individual cell to dream of becoming a mouse, a dog, or a human. But if we want to both achieve our dreams and live to see the day after, if we want to maintain our sense of purpose and drive as a species, that may be what we have to try and do.

Discuss