In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would talk about how we didn't (don't) know so much about the brain. He was sure that the magic going in there is probably outside of what anybody can understand, and that it would take one thousand years to make any significant progress in said understanding. I have had or heard similar arguments regarding cancer and biological systems in general.

There is no God hiding in there. Nature is not magic, but just evolution and selection, with a high degree of randomness. If Nature's random process can create intelligence, so can we, by the same more or less fortuitous means.

And now we have ChatGPT. It's not human level intelligence (yet). But to me, it is proof that intelligence is --as everybody said without quite really believing it--an emerging phenomenon: add enough computing units and a mechanism to coordinate them towards achieving a goal, and you get something "intelligent". We, the human beings, don't need to understand how the trillions of parameters work together. All we need to do is to find a process that finds those parameters.

We will discover that untreatable diseases like ageing (and cancer, its corollary) can be worked out in exactly the same way: we don't need to understand how our biology "computes" our fate. We just need to engineer the equivalent of backpropagation for biological tuning, and I have a hunch this too will be a matter of sheer computing power.

And we will get there by surprise, earlier than what most people expect. But only if our first act as newly ascended gods is not to create new creatures that take away our role of top species in our world.