The autoimmune era

Humans, it appears, have successfully conquered external biological threats to them, at least in the short run. One implication of this dominance is the alarming rise of autoimmune diseases that now account for most of the healthcare costs. Their finely tuned and powerful immune system has become a great liability for the modern humans, devoid of bugs. Boredom of overdesigned systems appear to be as deadly as anything else. Recent discovery of rare diseases in which the immune system attacks the brain itself is a constant reminder that the biggest threat for humans in the long run is their own immune systems.
 
Heart disease, cancer, mental disorders, COPD, asthma, arthritis, diabetes and hypertension account for over 80% of the healthcare costs. The bugs are not implicated in any and it appears that the body has begun to attack itself. Original design deficiencies in Homo sapiens have certainly caught up with them. The plumbing was never designed to last more than a few decades and the body, now stretched to twice the original design life, seems to struggle to get rid of the waste products both in the brain and in the circulation systems. To make matters worse, humans invented agriculture recently and this has fundamentally changed the course of their health. They have been feeding themselves material that neither the body nor the bacteria in their guts have ever been designed to efficiently digest.
 
We are in the autoimmune era, in which most humans will die because of the efficiency of their immune systems or the inability of the circulations systems to discharge waste products. Medicine and Engineering are certainly converging, but not in a way that technologists imagined.

Artificially Intelligent Pain

Recent observations (1) from the University of Cambridge that machine learning could identify the amount of pain suffered by sheep from their facial expressions is a good tangent to pursue. It may even have applications in humans, unable to communicate because of  recent or permanent loss of auditory and visual functions. Machines have been growing in stature and they seem to trump humans in most routine tasks. But increasingly, they are filling the gaps that humans are unable or untrained to do. There is no turning back from the AI train as it had left the station nearly 3 decades ago. Now cheaper and faster computers are making what could not be done by pure imagination.


On the other hand, humans generally get over-excited about emerging technologies and they believe problems could be solved in the matter of months, if not, days. Often, they have been wrong and many examples are available, in air travel, the internet, human genome based medicines and most recently, machine learning. Humans have been slow leaners, in spite of the massive energy hog they have been endowed with and they are programmed to look to the future rather than the past. That is a good thing but looking too far and over the hills may get them into trouble, something that did not exist for most of their evolution.


Understanding pain from facial expressions is a good step forward but a 67% accuracy (1) is not sufficiently robust for practical applications. Machine learning can easily create models of that accuracy from random and noisy data. Before declaring victory, much work is in store to think about what it could mean.


(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/artificial-intelligence-learns-spot-pain-sheep

Vancomycin 3.0 - The fight continues

Recent news (1) that a new breed of antibiotics, possibly many orders of higher potency than what is currently available, is entering the fight against the Earth's oldest inhabitants, could be welcome news for extension of life for humans. However, the long term implications of such leapfrogs remain uncertain. Bacteria, the most robust form of life known, have been fighting and improving for nearly 4 billion years. The upstarts, humans, seem to have turned them back incrementally. But the aggregate number of evolutionary experiments possible matter and here, the single cell organism reign supreme and for ever.

Bacteria have crowded out the human gut and they supply a large number of genes incorporated into the human architecture. There has been some evidence that bacteria control the human brain from the gut using nerve ends and they have occasionally even breached the blood-brain barrier. The original Extra-terrestrials have been potent and high achieving, seemingly able to dominate anything thrown their way. They even dance in unison and communicate by telepathy, notions higher order animals, find hard to appreciate. Lack of sight and biases helped them cooperate across species and evolve into the most dominant life form on Earth.

The winner of this race is predetermined as the early arrivals to the blue planet have captured the soul and imagination of the irrelevant speck in the universe.


(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/superantibiotic-25000-times-more-potent-its-predecessor

Sleep discrimination

A recent study (1) concludes that the world is heading toward sleepless nights with climate change driving temperatures up. A mere 1 degree temperature rise at night could result in a 10% loss in sleep. This is a problematic trend, with a skewed impact on the poor who can't afford air conditioning. More importantly, loss of sleep has significant deleterious effects on health and cognition, with possible broad impacts on students and young adults. This is another reminder that changes in the environment could have negative effects on the population in many different ways. Anything that affects the rapid progression of millennials is not something humanity could afford, at this critical juncture, if they were to leap to a level 1 society.


As they ventured out of Africa, humans encountered harsh winters in the North with their systems adjusting rapidly by changes in skin and hair colors. Those who went South had an easier time and appear to be well positioned for the rising temperatures of the modern world. However, the organ they carry on their shoulders hogs energy and has to be kept cool for them to slumber. A rise in the ambient temperature is problematic for the human system and especially for the CPU. Perhaps, it is time for newer technologies that let a cooler bubble around the human brain. Evolution of the human brain has been slow. Massive leaps achieved a few hundred thousand years ago by animal fat have been tempered significantly by the advent of agriculture. And, modern humans appear to show slow degradation of cognitive capabilities, perhaps aided by substance abuse.


It is unlikely that humans can turn back the temperature dial but perhaps they can find more creative ways to cool the brain cells and sleep better.


(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/scientists-warn-sleepless-nights-warming-world