Kai-Fu Lee is a pioneering expert on artificial intelligence. Why is AI relevant to human health? One reason is the hope AI will lead humans to make better personal choices. So how close are we to that point? If we need to understand the human brain in order to effectively reverse engineer it to make better choices, how well do we understand the human brain at this point? Well, we've been working on it since 1956, so a good 65 years should have us pretty far along the path, right? But it's only 5% or less according to Kai-Fu.
If you're a regular reader of my blog you may have noticed one of the themes I'm fond of repeating is the immense complexity of biology, particularly in comparison to technology, to which we assign enormous complexity while hardly thinking of biology at all.
T. Colin Campbell the nutritional biochemist who, after a professional life spent working to understand biochemistry, came to the conclusion we will likely never understand biology completely, and that biology is some orders of magnitude more complex than the rest of the universe. Humm. Well, perhaps that's only because we can see biology "up close", and better.
And T. Colin Campbell is no piker, he conducted "the most comprehensive study of human nutrition in history", and wrote the story of it in The China Study, and wrote Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, and most recently The Future of Nutrition: An Insider's Look at the Science, Why We Keep Getting It Wrong, and How to Start Getting It Right.
His life in nutritional biochemistry brought him to a conclusion that is basically as simple as this: we do not need to understand the cause of disease to understand the cause of health, and reach, through relatively simple diet and lifestyle choices, a radiant level of health most of us in today's world never imagined was possible.
And who wouldn't want that, when laid out in simple and manageable terms?
To understand all the ways we do not yet understand the human brain I'll suggest you watch this interview below with Kai-Fu, which is interesting on many levels, geo-political included. His answer to the question how well we currently understand the human brain begins at 8:15, if you're interested in only that one topic. But the entire piece, about 25 minutes long, is fascinating all the way through.
And BTW, in case it needs to be said, I'm no luddite, I love the digital revolution, which I feel has made me a more informed person in many ways. Digital devices are now "wearable", and will no doubt be enhanced with AI algos soon. What we need to remain aware of, according to Kai-Fu, is that machine learning has to be "taught" by humans what the "right" answers are that will be embedded into the AI algos so that the machine can recognize them amongst all the mountains of data.
And therein lies the potential for all sorts of mischief. One example stands out: the world is trending toward greater authoritarianism, which we quite recently saw even here in the developed west in the way the pandemic was handled with terribly destructive lockdowns and "mandated" pharmaceutical interventions. If we lose control over what goes onto and into our bodies we are living under the thumb of authoritarianism, and no longer free.
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