Your head is pounding. You can hardly see straight. It feels like your mouth is filled with something nasty. Maybe you’re shaky, achy, disheveled, discombobulated, and severely dehydrated.
You have a hangover.
It’s not an uncommon experience, as we all know, but it can be pretty unpleasant, and so many aging adults have decided to cut down a bit, to decrease the number of mornings they feel like they just got hit by a truck.
So how does all of this work in the AI era? Can AI cure hangovers?
If you’re asking this question with any kind of stray sincerity, the consensus is generally that AI can’t “cure hangovers,” much like it can’t buy you a pizza or sushi, but it can provide helpful tips for damage control. The phrase “I can’t do (x) but I can do (y)” is sort of a ChatGPT mantra.
This article from BestofAI actually cites Forbes, without providing an actual byline or reference. It has this to say on the subject:
“Generative AI can provide convenient and varied suggestions for hangover cures, but it is not a substitute for professional medical advice. AI can sometimes offer incorrect or unsafe advice due to its limitations, such as repeating false information or experiencing hallucinations. Users should always double-check AI-generated advice with reputable sources or medical professionals to ensure safety and accuracy. Engaging in a dialogue with AI can provide more tailored advice, but users should remain cautious and verify the information provided.”
That was originally in bullet points, (sorry), but essentially, it covers the bases.
What about longer-term research? Can AI eventually lead to prevention of this thorny malady?
Jackie Iversen of Sen-Jam Pharmaceutical has some thoughts.
On Hangovers and AI
“For 5000 years, humans have been trying to solve one thing,” Iversen said at a recent Ted Talk in Boston, “not cancer, not aging, not heartbreak: the hangover. The history of hangover cures reads like a comedy of errors. Ancient Egypt, dried bird beaks. The Greeks, laurel wreathes soaked in olive oil. Mongolia, pickled sheep eyeballs in tomato juice.”
Part of this enduring study, she suggested, has to do with the ubiquity of alcohol in our societies.
“Alcohol isn’t just a drink,” she said, “it’s woven into all cultures. It marks celebrations and connections, and it’s part of everyday life.”
Hangovers are so bad, though, that they have achieved their own mythic resonance, as Iversen describes using a saying that most of us are familiar with.
“’This hangover is so bad, I swear I’ll never drink again,’” she said. “We’ve all said it, we’ve all broken it. That’s why a million people type ‘hangover cure’ into Google every month.”
Those curious typists are going to get what I outlined above. But Iversen has some thoughts on what AI will eventually do for health science.
Noting that alcohol abuse leads to some 3 million deaths annually, and $1.7 trillion in healthcare costs, she notes that hangovers are “not trivial.”
In going over the various effects of the common hangover, she made a number of observations; first, that the effects of alcohol resonate, and even increase in some ways, after blood alcohol concentration is zero.
This, she said, is due to an inflammatory immune system response.
Oxidative stress and other changes, Iversen said, throw your body off balance.
“That’s why you wake up in the morning in catastrophic mode,” she said, also noting that the effects of drinking can trigger the same inflammatory pathways as those related to irritable bowel syndrome.
Then, she said, inflammation that is triggered can “echo” in the body for a long time.
“Chronic inflammation smolders,” Iversen said. “It’s like a hangover that never shuts off. … with low-grade chronic inflammation, that gut microbiome becomes dysregulated. Your immune system signaling goes out of whack.”
What does all of this mean for human health?
I thought Iversen really summed it all up in her closing remarks.
“A hangover, the thing we joke about and suffer through, and promise we’ll never repeat, may actually hold the key to understanding aging itself and inflammation, the slow burn that steals our health,” she said. “If we can learn how to resolve it, we may just live better, more productive, healthier years, and who knows, maybe even live in harsher environments like space, where astronauts age faster.”
In the future, she theorized, our inflammatory data may be, in her words, “woven together” into a greater body of knowledge that will boost healthcare research and our understanding of our bodies.
“That breakthrough would be a giant leap forward for mankind,” she said. “So to all of you who have endured a hangover, thank you. You have been participating in the largest, the longest and the messiest human study of inflammation, and who knows, your suffering may just be leading us to the fountain of youth.”
Where AI Comes In
Why is AI central to all of this effort?
Well, without the kinds of data gathering and automated insights that scientists get, we wouldn’t have made all of this progress on the human genome. We wouldn’t have the DNA knowledge that we have now. We wouldn’t know as much about pathways and what’s going on in our bodies at a cellular level.
Everything that Iversen talks about is based on a solid foundation of research that takes advantage of the awe-inspiring work of LLMs to show us what’s true across a wide field of scientific experimentation. And that’s really what modern science is – showing patterns in what looks like chaos.
As for the hangover, it really is a rite of passage for humans, and a real test of our systems in the ways that Iversen suggested.
So to the extent that we can craft responses that help deal with or reduce chronic inflammation, AI will have helped to cure not just a hangover, but what’s underneath the hangover – our bodies’ vulnerabilities that come with aging.
