We finally know why cancer is still winning. It is not the complexity of oncology, the variability of human biology, or the genuine difficulty of translating lab results into living patients. It is chips. Specifically, not enough of them.
According to the head of Arm, a major chip designer, modelling how a DNA marker behaves under cancer cannot happen right now because computers do not have enough processing power. The implication is clear: if we just had more silicon, we would have solved cancer by now. We are this close. So close that the only thing standing between us and immortality is a supply chain problem.
This is the modern tech industry’s greatest gift to itself—the ability to reframe every unsolved human problem as a hardware limitation. Polio? Would have been cured in 1952 if only they had possessed sufficient computational resources. The Black Death? Clearly a medieval chip shortage. Scurvy? Vitamin C was always available, but sailors needed better processors to realize it.
The beauty of this argument is its unfalsifiability. If cancer remains uncured despite abundant chips, well, we simply did not have enough chips. If we cure it tomorrow with today’s hardware, the chips deserve all the credit anyway. Either way, the tech industry wins and gets to sell more boxes.
Meanwhile, the actual oncologists—the ones who spend their careers learning how tumours metastasize, how immune systems fail, how drugs interact with specific mutations—continue their boring, chipless work. No press releases. No venture funding announcements. Just the grinding, unglamorous business of understanding disease.
But sure. Let us blame the shortage. It is much easier than admitting that some problems cannot be solved by throwing more processing power at them.