A European research team has announced that artificial intelligence, if used intentionally, can manufacture a large number of completely new biological and chemical weapons with great ease, which after work on its development can help change the map of war on this planet, which raised the concern of scientists.

According to a study published on March 7 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the team designed the MegaSyn2 molecule generator, an algorithm that uses machine learning to find new therapeutic compounds to treat human diseases.

Machine learning is one of the branches of artificial intelligence that aims to build and develop algorithms that allow computers to “learn” like humans, that is, to use the available information to derive general rules and provisions, and then apply them to the information received.

Reverse target

In normal cases, the algorithm is designed to reduce harm and maximize benefit, meaning that after the chemical compounds are created in the first cycle of the algorithm, they are refined in the second cycle to serve mainly the purpose of safety, so that they are not harmful to humans.

That's understandable, of course, and it's the logic any researcher would use to develop a new treatment to get as much benefit as possible, and as little harm as possible.

But according to the new study, the researchers reversed this mechanism, so the algorithm learned to prefer harm and avoid benefit, and in less than 6 hours after turning it on, their model produced 40,000 chemical molecules that are characterized as harmful to the human body.

A chemical weapon is defined as any chemical substance that can be used to cause human harm when placed in a military form (munitions, bombs, or others). For example, chlorine is used as a chemical weapon when fired in the form of bombs that irritate the nose and airway when inhaled. Choking.

Machine learning technology is a branch of artificial intelligence with the aim of building and developing algorithms that allow computers to “learn” like humans (maxpixels).

future of war

Of course, researchers do not target the creation of chemical or biological weapons, but the research paper came in the context of a series of "convergence" conferences established by the Swiss government to discuss developments in the world of chemistry and biology, and to think about the potential security implications of the risks of these developments.

According to the conference statement, there has not previously been much discussion in the scientific community about the dual use of AI applications that create new drugs, on the one hand they may be beneficial, and on the other hand they are very harmful.

The researchers hope that this new data will help develop better mechanisms to curb the abusive use of advances in artificial intelligence, now and in the future, in the context of chemical warfare.

In fact, the debate on this subject deserves great attention day after day, especially in a context in which the rates of use of chemical and biological weapons are rising around the world, and some specialists expect that the use of biological or chemical weapons in the current Ukrainian war is a matter of time.