We often hear about the benefits artificial intelligence (AI) can bring to medicine and healthcare through drug research, but could it also pose a threat? Researchers from Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a North Carolina-based drug discovery company, have published a paper that highlights the dangerous potential of AI and machine learning to discover biochemical weapons. By simply tweaking a machine learning model called MegaSyn to reward instead of penalise predicted toxicity, their AI was able to generate 40,000 biochemical weapons in six hours. Worryingly, the researchers admitted to never having considered the risks of misuse involved in designing molecules. "The thought had never previously struck us. We were vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals, but that did not relate to us; we primarily operate in a virtual setting. Our work is rooted in building machine learning models for therapeutic and toxic targets to better assist in the design of new molecules for drug discovery. We have spent decades using computers and AI to improve human health--not to degrade it," the paper noted.

Readers beware: Halloween comes early this year. This is a scary column. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of artificial intelligence. It's "world altering," concluded the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence last year, since it is an enabling technology akin to Thomas Edison's description of electricity: "a field of fields … it holds the secrets which will reorganize the life of the world." While the commission also noted that "No comfortable historical reference captures the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on national security," it's rapidly becoming clear that those ramifications are far more extensive -- and alarming -- than experts had imagined.