Manu Joseph: Why human health is more than a behaviour problem

American tech billionaires are trying to make death obsolete. After all, death is nature’s technology, and the fate of all tech is to become obsolete one day. I would never mock them because I have great hope in the self-interest of rich people. 

Their desire to live forever, or at least for very long, has made the health of all humans, even those who are not millionaires, the emotional goal of modern science; everything else is just business. Not surprisingly, the hype of this decade, AI, is at the core of most attempts.

A few days ago, the founder of Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, and the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, announced a venture that they say will solve one of the biggest practical problems in health today, which is that most advice is too general to be relevant to an individual. 

Also read: Are behavioural nudges overrated or just badly designed?

Their Thrive Ai Health plans to change the behaviour of people by giving information that is highly specific to the person who is using the app. “AI, by using the power of hyper-personalization, can significantly improve these behaviours," they wrote in an essay in Time magazine.

They make two assumptions. One is that people want to be healthy. The second is that people give truthful information about themselves to an app, in private. It may seem obvious that both these assumptions are correct, but humans are so twisted that they may not be right. 

For instance, people lie about their diet even on surveys that do not ask for their identity, probably because they find truths about themselves unpleasant. This, according to longevity specialist Peter Attia, is a reason why he does not take most diet research seriously.

The other assumption, that people want to be healthy, has a layer of truth, but it does not matter. What people want often has nothing to do with what they actually do because what they do is subject to a secret hierarchy of things that they hold dear. People want to be healthy, but what they want more is to eat tasty food, three times a day, every day of the week.

Huffington and Altman assume that the reason most people are unhealthy is that they are unable to change their behaviour, and that is because they don’t have good information about themselves.

Also read: Alas: Behavioural science should never have become a catch-all term

While it is true that most health advice is general, it is also true that general advice is mostly good. Stay away from sugar, exercise, be active and don’t be a glutton. There’s nothing in this that can harm anybody, and it has nothing that will not do some good to most people. Yet, most people are not able to change their behaviour, and this is not because an app didn’t send a notification asking them to avoid that third bottle of soda. They are in the grip of human nature.

What is the true nature of people? The question is an obsession with Western anthropology, and the answers are usually qualities that people do not exhibit. There is a lot of talk about “hunting" and “gathering." “Picking berries," figures a lot. But then the greatest evidence of what people really are lies in how they are, how they exist. Not in what they stop doing the moment they get a chance.

The reason most people are unhealthy is that it’s hard work to go against human nature, and against an evolutionary drawback—that we evolved for scarcity. To live in plenty and behave as though there is scarcity is to be a philosopher. This is impossible for most people.

The solution to the global pandemic of poor health is something that’s kinder than asking people to change. It’s a pill.

Or some other form of drug. A direct medical intervention is the true equalizer that can help most people achieve what is possible only for some. On this, science does not offer any immediate hope.

Science, in fact, is the most overrated of human pursuits. Medicine, especially, has been a big failure. It is true that modern medicine has increased the quality of information and debunked many of its own myths, and ensured that billions of babies have lived, but its greatest achievements concern prolonging death and not prolonging life. 

People are living much longer, but they are not living with the zest of their ancestors. People are living in a manner that is exactly the wrong way to die. Personally, I would rather leap off a cliff heroically than live the way most people in this world live.

This will not be changed by an app that uses spurious personal data to ask people to go against their will and do difficult things like eat bland food, swim or lift weights. The only way most people will live healthy old ages is if there is a pill that not only prolongs their death, but also their youth.

Also read: Why do we behave the way we do? The secret lies deep within.

There is another reason why medicine has disappointed, and this is an unsung reason. Parents have become kinder to children and they are given freedoms to avoid dreary career paths, like hard sciences. 

Just as the sciences once stole our school geniuses from the arts, then technology stole them from the sciences, something else is stealing them from both tech and sciences. If geniuses are not forced to toil in dreary scientific careers early in their lives, we are in trouble.

But then, there might be compensation in the form of AI. Through its brute ability to make numerous permutations and combinations, hundreds of labs across the world are searching for a way to help people live the wrong way, yet die the right way.