# In defence of the human agency: "Curing Cancer" is the new "Think of the Children"

**Epistemic Status**: Philosophical. Based on the debate by Togelius at NeurIPS

"*The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all*" \- H.L. Mencken

The Incident
============

At the NeurIPS 2025 debate panel, when most panelists were discussing about replacing humans at all levels for scientific progress, Dr. Julian Togelius stood and protested vehemently. In fact, he went as far as to call it "*evil*".

His argument was that people need agency, love what they do, find happiness in discovering something themselves, and cutting out humans from this loop is removing this agency. He pointed to the young researchers gathered around there, and pointed out that we are depriving them of activity they love and a key source of meaning in their lives. 

The first question which came up there was - what if AI finds a cure to cancer? By stopping it, we are causing harm to people with cancer etc. Dr. Togelius was actually fine with some people still dying of cancer, if it means humans don't lose their meaning in life.

The Tweet and the Firestorm
===========================

He then sent this following [***Tweet***](https://x.com/togelius/status/1997920576804143583) and the response was quite an eye opener about how people think. A vast majority of people were calling him an evil man, who, for his personal interests, is trying to kill people, and the like. 

The Mencken Principle
=====================

There is a difficult reality in defending fundamental rights. For one to support a fundamental principle, one often has to defend the most hated thing in the room. 

As journalist H.L. Mencken so eloquently put it, *the trouble with defending rights is that you spend the most time defending scoundrels*. In this case, the so called scoundrel is not a person. **The scoundrel is cancer**.

Dr. Togelius has been forced into the unenviable position of serving as the defence attorney for cancer (or at least, for a slower cure). He has to argue for a world where this villain persists longer, simply to ensure that it is **us humans** who defeats it. He is defending the enemy's right to stay on the battlefield, because he does not want the enemy to be defeated by magic, if that magic also defeats humans by proxy.

The Motte and the Bailey
========================

We all have heard of the usage of **Think of the Children** as a thought-terminating cliche. It has been used so much, and in so many varied circumstances that, we understand it for what it is - using an unassailable moral good concept to shut down every argument. My view is that - the **Think of the Cancer** \- argument is exactly the same. A way to shut down every argument, not even willing to hear out the defence of human agency.

We see this everywhere. Radical technologies are introduced through the unassailable moral shield of the 'medical edge case

*   Take the example of Neuralink. Neuralink is not pitched as a way to merge the human species with AI (a controversial Bailey). While Musk did inform this idea in some of the tweets, the primary way it is pitched is as a way to help quadriplegics regain mobility (an unassailable Motte). 
*   The same way, surveillance tools are never pitched as a way to track citizens. Rather, they are pitched as a way to catch terrorists and kidnappers. 

Once the infrastructure is built for the *edge case*, which is driven by our compassion, it is inevitably scaled to the *general case, which is rarely to our liking. *

The critics of Dr. Togelius are doing the exact same thing. They are using the medical edge case of curing cancer to smuggle in the general case - which is the total obsolescence of human intellectual effort. They are daring us to attack the Motte, knowing that it makes us look like monsters, while they quietly annex the Bailey.

The end of Human Pre-Eminence
=============================

Right now, Dr. Togelius is being painted as evil, an egotistical person who values his own intellectual satisfaction over the lives of dying patients. But his point is much larger, and far more important. He is holding the line for a (now fragile) principle - the principle of human pre-eminence.

For the last 10,000 years, which is but a blink of an eye in nature's terms, humanity has clawed its way to a position of pre-eminence over nature. We moved from being hunted and living in panic, to a life of luxury and moderate happiness. We no longer live in abject fear, worrying about every rustle of the leaves, struggling to survive. We have to thank our ancestors for this, each of them improving our lives a little bit, until we are where we are today - able to move around with no fear, enjoying our leisure, and free to pursue our ambitions and hopes.

At this stage, bringing an otherworldly and superior object to life, which could mean us going back to where we were, is hubris to the absolute degree.  Even if by some absolute miracle, the super intelligence turns out to be benign, we still lose our pre-eminence. We become pets - well-kept, healthy, immortal pets, living in a terrarium managed by a super intelligence - losing the very reason for our existence. 

As a comment in a Guardian article so succinctly put it, "We did not vote for this - a few people changing the lives of our species for ever".

We are on the verge of giving up our agency and pre-eminence over our world. We should not let the "Cure for Cancer" bully us out of discussing whether that trade is actually worth it.

### Context

The views on human agency and AI are themes I have been exploring for years. In 2017, I wrote an open-source novel ([UTOPAI](https://github.com/rajmohanutopai/utopai/blob/main/UTOPAI_2017_full.pdf)). It depicts a world where the protagonists (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza), live as pets. Desperate for human agency, inflamed by reading old novels, they try to get jobs in a world that has optimised away the need of human struggle. 

Github link - https://github.com/rajmohanutopai/utopai/blob/main/UTOPAI\_2017\_full.pdf