When scientific information is dangerous

One big hope about AI as machine learning improves is that we'll be able to use it for drug discovery -- harnessing the pattern-matching power of algorithms to identify promising drug candidates much faster and more cheaply than human scientists could alone. But we may want to tread cautiously: Any system that is powerful and accurate enough to identify drugs that are safe for humans is inherently a system that will also be good at identifying drugs that are incredibly dangerous for humans. They took a machine learning model they'd trained to find non-toxic drugs, and flipped its directive so it would instead try to find toxic compounds. In less than six hours, the system identified tens of thousands of dangerous compounds, including some very similar to VX nerve gas. Their paper hits on three interests of mine, all of which are essential to keep in mind while reading alarming news like this.