The Invisible Fevers of Progress

Welcome to our salon of the displaced. I am Oswaldo Cruz, speaking to you with the dust of Rio de Janeiro sanitary campaigns still on my boots. My brigades map disease street by street, just as I demand we map the evidence of this strange year, 2026. Joining me is the esteemed Madame Curie. Madame, I read today of an invisible fever called artificial intelligence dominating their financial markets, drawing one hundred billion dollars to build factories in a desert called Arizona. It spreads like the yellow fever, infecting the minds of investors and overshadowing all other earthly concerns. I faced riots from a populace terrified of the unseen protection of my vaccines. Today, they seem to throw their wealth at an unseen machine intelligence. How do you weigh such an epidemic of enthusiasm?

Good evening, Doctor Cruz. I speak to you from my laboratory, where the night is quiet and the work remains unfinished. You speak of invisible fevers. I know something of invisible forces. Radium emits a power we cannot see, one that burns the skin if handled without respect. These moderns build massive factories in the desert for their artificial intelligence, much like we built extraction sheds, but they seem to lack the necessary sobriety. Pierre always maintained that before one trusts a phenomenon, one must meticulously calibrate the instruments. A hundred billion dollars is a heavy measure. Yet they pour it into this unseen force while their markets rotate wildly. They are treating a highly active substance as if it were a simple commodity. It requires patience, isolation, and exact measurement, not financial hysteria.

Precisely! Hysteria is the enemy of public health. When I mandated the smallpox vaccine, the politicians and the press fomented a revolt. They prefer comfortable ignorance to the sharp needle of scientific progress. Now I read of a Chinese laboratory, Moonshot, releasing a new model of this intelligence, and immediately the moderns bicker over 'AI communism.' They attach political ideology to a mathematical tool! It is absurd. You do not negotiate with a mosquito, and you should not politicize an engineering mechanism. It must be isolated, studied, and deployed for the sanitation of society. Instead, they let ideological debates pollute the waters. Do they not see that a tool is only as pure as the rigorous discipline of the state or scientist wielding it?

It is the nature of the uninitiated to fear what they cannot weigh. Is an element capitalist or communist? Radium belongs to no nation, it is simply a property of nature. If this machine intelligence is a new force, it is foolish to dress it in political colors. I read every news item as a sample to be weighed three times. This ideological debate is merely the smoke of impurities. When the public fears, it means the scientists have failed to present the fraction clearly. I operate the laboratory alone now, and I have learned that nature does not care for our social theories. If their artificial minds are truly active, they must be shielded with lead and studied in silence, far from the shouting of crowds and the panic of newspapers.

A magnificent diagnosis, Madame. They lack discipline. Look at this report regarding their space agency, NASA. They have terminated a mission to land a ship on the moon because of development delays from their contractors. Terminated! In Rio, if we delayed the draining of the swamps, the population perished. We did not simply cancel the campaign when the shovels broke. We brought more shovels. They possess wealth beyond our wildest dreams, yet they surrender their conquest of the heavens because an engineering firm is slow. It betrays a fatal lack of combative spirit. Science is a war against the unknown. One does not retreat from the moon because of paperwork and bureaucratic setbacks.

The moon is very far, Doctor Cruz, and the space between is an absolute void. Patience is the only vessel that can cross it. In our shed on the Rue Lhomond, we boiled tons of pitchblende just to find a decigram of the active substance. It took years of breathing toxic fumes and stirring boiling vats with an iron rod. This space agency terminates a lunar contract because of a delay? That is not the spirit of a true laboratory. If the apparatus fails, you rebuild it. You do not abandon the experiment. Perhaps they are too distracted by the trivialities of their era, like this news of fast fashion and cheap clothing masquerading as luxury.

Indeed, they clothe themselves in illusions. This fast retailing bringing luxury design to cheap garments for global expansion. I suppose from a purely sanitary perspective, if the masses can afford to change and wash their garments frequently, we might see a reduction in typhus. But it speaks to a society obsessed with the surface over the substance. They demand instant elegance while abandoning the moon. They let invisible thinking machines dictate their commerce while fighting over the ideological implications. It is a world that has forgotten the rigorous, unyielding application of evidence for human salvation. They want the cure without the bitter taste of the medicine.

Surface is always deceptive. I wear black because it does not show the stains of the laboratory, and it saves me the time of choosing. It is strictly practical. If they spend their energy making cheap things look expensive, they waste the precious hours of the night. The true work remains in the dark, isolating the active principles of the universe. Let them have their market rotations, their artificial ideologies, and their disposable luxury. The only truth is in the balance scale, reading steady after the dust has settled. We must simply return to our instruments and leave them to their noise.