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

livemint.com:

To be healthy is to find the right way to die. This may involve dying later than sooner, but this is only a popular part of it. The right way to die is to be full of life, until the end, the best we can be using the cards we have been dealt.

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.

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.