This past week, as part of the Aspen Ideas Festival, I spoke with Kai-Fu Lee, the president and chair of Sinovation Ventures and a pioneer in artificial intelligence. We discussed his recent argument that AI has been of limited use in the response to the coronavirus crisis. And then we talked about the future of work and why he thinks that Covid-19 is going to accelerate trends toward automation. Because of the virus, and because of the way we all work now, we're going to have many more robots and other machines in our factories, restaurants, and kitchens. A lightly edited transcript is below.

Variational AI Inc.'s bread and butter rests in novel drug discovery, specifically using artificial intelligence (AI) to compress the years-long preclinical process to perhaps a single year. But in the midst of a pandemic, even a year might be too long to find a treatment for COVID-19, according to CEO Handol Kim. "Even if we're able to collapse the front end, you still have five or six years of clinical trials and who knows if we need a drug in five or six years for COVID-19?" he said. "We thought, 'Well, the fastest way to do this is repurposing existing drugs.'" The pitch caught the interest of the Digital Technology Supercluster, which last month committed to spending $60 million of its $153 million budget to develop partnerships across its networks to address issues brought on by the pandemic.

The worldwide fight against COVID-19 continues to challenge AI experts. The Pope issued a challenge for AI experts to develop an "ethical algorithm" that would ensure fairness; Some new AI research shows how people are feeling about the virus. Other researchers are experimenting with the use of sound to detect the virus. Shortly before the Vatican closed due to the virus, members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which researches bioethics and Catholic moral theology, worked on getting a commitment from AI developers to write an "ethical" algorithm in each AI system, according to an account in SSPX.news, the communication agency of the Society of St. Pius, based in Paris. "Following the example of electricity, AI is not necessary to perform a specific action, it is rather intended to change the way, the mode with which we carry out our daily actions," stated Fr.