What about my hair?

For all the advances in technology and all the promises of space exploration I still think we are behind in our understanding of life and our own abilities.

For decades we talked about specialized medicine that can be tailored to an individual person, that can cure an illness without side effects. Or gene therapy, where unfortunate individual that have nefarious mutations would obtain a fix for their erroneous DNA.

Technology, and especially AI makes us think that we can achieve all these goals in a short time. AI being code can in fact be changed and updated faster than generations of DNA mutations. But AI being code also does not live in the physical space, and it is not yet able to interact with our world. At least not in the way we want. An autonomous car is AI on wheels acting on the physical world. But our forecast of having fully functional self-driving cars right about now were in fact incorrect, a gross miscalculation of our abilities to drive AI (pun intended). We are in fact many years away from cars that can reliably drive in the snow and heavy rain to the same level as human beings.

Unfortunately, we drank our own Kool-aid. And similarly, AI is not going to help us to understand our biology anytime soon. Why? Maybe partly because of the fixation of that field of science to understand it all. Or many other fields of science, thinking that we are in fact clearly able to derive equations and laws for everything and that our mind would be able to understand it all, no matter the number of variables or components in the system.

But we can only understand the smoke as a trend. We can model the smoke with equations that on average give us an approximate view of how the smoke cloud evolves in time. We will never understand how each particle of smoke is moving and having all equations for all of them. That would be insane. Then why do they want to doit for every cell in our body or every neuron or synapse in our brain?

Think we are being tough? But then what about my hair? Suppose you need more of your own hair on your head… well we do not even have a way to grow our own hair back. In other words, we cannot even force our body to grow more hair where we want to.

PS:

this essay was written without generative AI. Yes it shows…

about the author

I have more than 20 years of experience in neural networks in both hardware and software (a rare combination). About me: Medium, webpage, Scholar, LinkedIn.

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