I came across this article in the Financial Times yesterday (March 19 2022) on the Dark Sides of Using AI to Design Drugs by Anjana Ahuja.

Scientists at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a North Carolina company using AI to create drugs for rare diseases, experimented with how easy it would be to create rogue molecules for chemical warfare.

As it happens, the answer is VERY EASY! The model took only 6 hours to spit out a set of 40,000 destructive molecules.

And it’s not surprising. As French cultural theorist and philosopher Paul Virilio once said, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck”. Just like social platforms can be used both to connect with long lost friends AND to spread fake news, AI can be used both to save lives AND to destroy them.

This is a chilling reminder about the destructive potential of increasingly sophisticated technologies that our civilisation has developed but may not have the wisdom to use well.