Caution: May Cause Billionaires

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, May 21, 2026

 

In her new book, former Wall Street Journal technology reporter Joanna Stern recounts how, after receiving a breast ultrasound, she sat down with her doctor who had run the images through an AI program used to detect cancer.

 

The Koios DS Breast ultrasound tool found some masses, which it marked as benign. Others it marked suspicious and needing further investigation (spoiler: she is fine). When Stern interviewed the Koios CEO, Chad McClennan, he told her that when the program labels a finding “suspicious,” it will be wrong one-third of the time. But compare that to human radiologists, who are wrong two-thirds of the time.

 

AI can already detect cancers that humans using existing technology cannot, and it’s getting better every day. A study of 100,000 women in Sweden suggested that AI use in breast cancer screenings cut late diagnosis by 12 percent.

 

An AI model that analyzes and predicts cell movement was reportedly able to spot pancreatic cancer three years before doctors reading scans could. Other progress has been shown in detecting other organ diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.

 

But while AI may lead to cures for disease, progressives around America are more concerned about the byproducts of such innovation. Instead of marveling that we may be on the verge of machines that catch the tumors that would otherwise kill us or our loved ones, they’ve decided the real crisis is that a few rich people are profiting from the data centers that make it possible.

 

The left’s complaint is twofold: The infrastructure is ruining the environment, and billionaires shouldn’t exist.

 

On the first point: Data centers do consume substantial energy and water, but the extent is grossly overstated, sometimes by a factor of 1,000. The U.S. already has well over 3,000 operational data centers, and yet Americans can still drink water and charge their phones.

 

Sure, some of the concerns about AI dependency are legitimate. A study in The Lancet: Gastroenterology and Hepatology (bathroom reading in every household) suggested that endoscopists who relied on AI for detection eventually saw their own diagnostic skills erode.

 

But progressives aren’t sending their best to make the anti-AI case. It is expected that the annual AI medical-diagnostic market will increase from $10 billion in 2026 to nearly $210 billion by 2034, meaning many rich people are spending heavily to make even more money. So in response, what we get from progressives is a performance — an aesthetic of class solidarity that falls apart the moment you look at where the performers are staging it.

 

Take Sarah Paulson, a wealthy actress who wore a dollar-bill mask over her eyes to the Met Gala to protest wealthy people. Was the message that the rich are blind? That they’re crass and gauche? Whatever the metaphor was supposed to be, it dissolved into the ambient absurdity of a millionaire at a $100,000-per-ticket party complaining about income inequality to a crowd of millionaires.

 

Or consider the scenes outside Luigi Mangione’s hearing this week, where a cluster of supporters cheered for a man charged with murdering a health-insurance CEO. The Mangione fan club has decided that killing insurance executives is, at minimum, understandable — a conclusion that requires you to believe that the best way to improve Americans’ access to health insurance is to gun down the people running the industry. This is the politics of grievance metastasized into a cruel and sinister ideology, and it found three enthusiasts willing to clap for it in public.

 

Hasan Piker, the progressive streamer, has taken to endorsing what he calls “microlooting” — the stealing of goods from retail stores as a form of economic protest. The theory, insofar as there is one, seems to be that theft hurts corporate owners. The reality, as anyone who has ever worked retail can tell you, is that theft hurts store employees. Hours get cut. Departments get shuttered. The workers Piker claims to champion absorb the loss while the ownership adjusts its insurance premiums.

 

Then there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has argued that no one can honestly earn a billion dollars — that the figure itself is proof of exploitation. “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” the New York congresswoman said on a podcast as the host, fellow midwit Ilana Glazer, cackled along. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”

 

This is a theory she has developed and distributed primarily on social media platforms owned by billionaires. (AOC also used to own a car manufactured by one of those billionaires, in fact the wealthiest man on earth, back when they were fashionable among the climate-obsessed.) The hypocrisy is not subtle.

 

And yet progressives never seem to make the connection. Every AOC video passes through a data center at some point. The angry emails to legislators opposing new AI infrastructure? Also traveling through data centers. The petitions, the Substacks, the fundraising emails, the protest TikToks — all of it depends on the same digital architecture that progressives spend their afternoons denouncing.

 

This brings us to left-wing Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, who recently posted on X — which is, once again, owned by the world’s wealthiest man — to sing the praises of socialism. A better encapsulation of the modern progressive dilemma doesn’t exist. As Marshall McLuhan once said, the medium is the message, and the message here is: I oppose the people who built the thing I am currently using to tell you I oppose them.

 

The data-center freakout is especially ridiculous. Every solution to problems presented by data centers will also pass through data centers. Energy-efficient cooling technology, optimization of the grid, reducing resource-consumption: AI is the technology most likely to figure it all out.

 

Of course there are real concerns about AI, not least that as we become dependent on it, our minds may atrophy. But that doesn’t mean billionaires should be prevented from developing it. It’s up to us how we use it.

 

The left has decided that because AI makes some people enormously rich, the technology itself is suspect. It doesn’t occur to them that AI, among its many benefits, could lead to astounding breakthroughs in health care for all of us. The Koios DS program doesn’t care about the politics of its investors. It cares, in the only way a program can care, about the pixels in an ultrasound image. It finds the thing the doctor missed. If technology like that makes a few people billionaires, you’d have to admit they earned it.