RAKxa: is this the new frontier of wellness?

Deepak Chopra is sitting in the grounds of RAKxa, a wellness retreat just outside Bangkok, expounding on the virtues of AI, and especially how it can help with climate change, disease, health, emotional disorders, suicide prevention, depression, anxiety, social justice and even conflict resolution. To say he’s an advocate would be a massive understatement.

“We talk about the weaponization of AI, but we always have issues with technological development,” he says, wearing his Tom Ford glasses and two smart watches (neither tells the time — “the only time is now,” he’ll say, “but they measure my stress”) and talking in perfect paragraphs. “We had fire, the invention of the wheel, computers, email, everything. It’s part of our Darwinian principle. We have to adapt and during adaptation there is discomfort.

“I took a computer to my dad in India and showed him how to send emails. So, he goes on the computer and types it out and prints