FLI March 2022 Newsletter - Future of Life Institute

This Interesting Engineering piece highlights how even an AI built to find'helpful drugs', when tweaked just a little, can find things that are rather less helpful. Collaborations Pharmaceuticals carried out a simple experiment to see what would happen if the AI they had built was slightly altered to look for chemical weapons, rather than medical treatments. According to a paper they published in Nature Machine Intelligence journal, the answer was not particularly reassuring. When reprogrammed to find chemical weapons, the machine learning algorithm found 40,000 possible options in just six hours. These researchers had'spent decades using computers and A.I. to improve human health', yet they admitted, after the experiment, that they had been'naive in thinking about the potential misuse of trade'.