AI threatens yet more jobs – now, lab rats: Animal testing could be on the way out, thanks to machine learning

Machine learning algorithms can help scientists predict chemical toxicity to a similar degree of accuracy as animal testing, according to a paper published this week in Toxicological Sciences. A whopping €3bn (over $3.5bn) is spent every year to study how the negative impacts of chemicals on animals like rats, rabbits or monkeys. The top nine most frequently tested safety experiments resulted in the death of the poor critters 57 per cent of the time in Europe in 2011. By using software, chemists may be able to spend less on animal testing and save more creatures. To demonstrate this, first, a team of researchers scoured through a range of databases to label 80,908 different chemicals.