Stealing the creations of artists, assisting pupils in exam fraud, and now this. Artificial intelligence has the potential to be abused to create extraordinarily lethal biological and chemical weapons, according to scientists.
Four experts who work on AI-based drug discovery have cautioned that the development of poisonous nerve agents using AI technology might be easily done, and that these agents could potentially be utilised for biological or chemical warfare.
The Swiss Federal Institute for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Protection assigned the researchers the task of determining if AI could be used for evil purposes. In just six hours, they were able to produce not one or two, but 40,000 potentially harmful medicines.
One of the researchers and the paper’s lead author, Fabio Urbina, told the technology publication “The Verge” that all they needed to do was “turn the switch” and ask, “Instead of heading away from toxicity, what if we move towards toxicity?”
The journal Nature Machine Intelligence has published the findings.
According to Urbina, the issue is “how easy it was,” not that the AI created these chemicals, “many of which seem like chemical warfare agents.”
“Many of the items we used are available for no cost. A toxicity dataset is available for download anyplace, “Added he.
The UK’s Defense Science and Technology Lab developed the poisonous nerve toxin VX in the 1950s, and some of the compounds produced by AI were allegedly even “more toxic than VX.” VX is a poisonous substance that paralyses muscles in order to murder its victims.
