By Alessandra Suuberg, Decency LLC
The publications mentioned here date back to March and April 2022, but they came to my attention this morning via social media. They relate to the topic of “dual use” research, entailing, for example, “biological research with a legitimate scientific purpose that may, if misused, pose a biological threat to public health and/or national security.”
Dual-use technologies can essentially be flipped and used in different ways.
The pieces in question, published this year in Nature Machine Intelligence, discuss the possibility of using artificial intelligence for drug discovery (i.e., finding ways to heal), and then flipping that technology and using it to generate weapons (i.e., finding ways to harm).
In March, Nature Machine Intelligence published a comment by Fabio Urbina et al. reporting that artificial intelligence could be used to generate “40,000 candidate toxic molecules, including the nerve agent VX, but also many new and even more toxic compounds together with their precursors,” in only six hours.
Motivated by the question of whether “technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons,” researchers had generated these computational results—and subsequently “shut down their computational experiment and kept the results, and knowledge of dangerous compounds and their precursors, under lock and key.”
A subsequent editorial raised the “urgent question [of] how to achieve the right balance between keeping science open and preventing misuse or malicious repurposing.”
The comment and editorial can be found here:
Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery (March 2022)
Tackling the perils of dual use in AI (April 2022)
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