So here I am, third bourbon of the morning, reading about whether artificial intelligence can cure hangovers, and I can’t help but laugh. Not because it’s funny – well, it is – but because it’s such a perfectly human question to ask a machine. “Hey computer, can you fix the consequences of my poor life choices?”
The short answer, according to the folks who actually bothered to research this, is no. AI can’t cure your hangover. But apparently it can give you tips, which is sort of like asking your smartest friend how to fix a flat tire and having them read you the owner’s manual. Technically helpful. Practically useless when you’re face-down on the bathroom floor at 6 AM wondering why you thought that last shot of tequila was a good idea.
What really gets me about this whole thing is the premise. We’ve got these massive language models that can write poetry, code software, and probably fake their way through a philosophy degree, but when it comes to the oldest human problem in the book – feeling like garbage after drinking too much – they’re about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. They can tell you to drink water and eat toast. Congratulations, machine learning. You’ve achieved the wisdom of every grandmother who ever lived.
But here’s where it gets interesting, and I mean actually interesting, not Silicon Valley “disruption” interesting. This researcher, Jackie Iversen, gave a TED talk – because of course she did – about how hangovers might actually be the key to understanding inflammation and aging. She’s got a point that made me put down my glass for a second. Just a second.
Turns out that when you wake up feeling like someone replaced your brain with a bag of broken glass, your blood alcohol is already at zero. You’re not drunk anymore. You’re experiencing what happens after the party, when your immune system throws its own little tantrum and decides to set everything on fire. Inflammation. The body’s way of saying “what the hell did you just do to me?”
And here’s the thing that actually made me think – chronic inflammation is basically a hangover that never shuts off. It’s like living in perpetual Sunday morning, except instead of eventually getting better and ordering Chinese food, you just keep getting older and your joints hurt more. Low-grade inflammation is apparently what steals your health over time, like a really slow, really boring thief who doesn’t even have the decency to break a window.
The ancient cures Iversen mentions are pure gold, by the way. Dried bird beaks in Egypt. Laurel wreaths soaked in olive oil in Greece. Pickled sheep eyeballs in tomato juice in Mongolia. You know what? At least those people were trying something. At least they had the courage to look at a sheep eyeball and think “yeah, that might help.” Now we just ask ChatGPT and get told to hydrate and take some aspirin. Where’s the poetry in that?
But I’m burying the lead here, which is that AI’s actual role in this whole mess isn’t about curing your individual hangover. It’s about understanding the pattern underneath all our hangovers. Every time someone drinks too much and feels like garbage the next day, they’re basically participating in the world’s longest, messiest scientific study. We’re all lab rats, except the maze is a dive bar and the reward is feeling terrible.
What AI does – and this is where I’ll give the machines their due – is help researchers see patterns in all that chaos. It’s like having someone who never gets tired sort through millions of data points about how our bodies respond to alcohol, inflammation, immune responses, all that biological noise that humans have been generating for thousands of years. The LLMs can spot connections that would take human researchers decades to find, if they found them at all.
Iversen suggests that understanding hangovers might help us live longer, healthier lives. Maybe even survive in space, where apparently astronauts age faster, which sounds like the worst deal ever. “Hey, want to float around in zero gravity? Great! You’ll come back looking like you spent a decade in a tanning bed made of radiation.” But if figuring out how to resolve inflammation could help with that, then maybe all those mornings I’ve spent contemplating my life choices while staring at the ceiling fan weren’t completely wasted.
The irony here is thick enough to cut with a knife. We’ve built these incredible thinking machines, these silicon brains that can process information faster than any human ever could, and we’re using them to study the aftermath of getting drunk. Five thousand years of human civilization, and we’re still trying to solve the hangover problem. Not cancer first. Not world hunger. The hangover.
Although to be fair, Iversen’s right about one thing – alcohol is woven into every culture. It marks celebrations, connections, everyday life. We’ve been drinking since we figured out that fermented fruit could make the world slightly more bearable, and we’ll probably keep drinking until the sun burns out. The hangover is the price we pay for being social animals who discovered chemistry by accident.
So can AI cure hangovers? No. But can it help us understand the biological processes that make hangovers happen, which might eventually lead to treatments for chronic inflammation and age-related decline? Apparently yes. Will any of that help me tomorrow morning when I wake up feeling like I got hit by a truck? Probably not.
But you know what? There’s something almost beautiful about the fact that our worst decisions might be contributing to medical science. Every hangover is data. Every morning of regret is a data point in the largest, longest study of human inflammation ever conducted. We’re all volunteers in this grand experiment, whether we know it or not.
The machines can process the data, find the patterns, help the scientists understand what’s happening in our bodies when we poison ourselves for fun. They can’t fix us, not directly. They can’t make the room stop spinning or make that weird taste in your mouth go away. But they can help us understand why it happens, and maybe, eventually, how to make it better.
Until then, I’ll stick with the old remedies. Water. Toast. Hair of the dog. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll appreciate that my suffering might someday help humanity unlock the secrets of aging and inflammation.
Or maybe I’ll just have another drink and call it research.
pours bourbon
—Henry
Source: Can AI Cure Hangovers?