Forgive me for being concerned. Machines are being used to create totally new types of life, stuff nature has never dabbled in.
Stanford and Arc Institute’s Evo used AI to design full bacteriophage genomes, that is making viable micro life. And not just a little bit; researchers synthesized 302 fully AI-created organisms. It could be really useful, for instance 16 became working viruses that infected, copied themselves, and killed E. coli.
They used Google’s AlphaFold to show where proteins fold. The Evo program is effectively turning biology into a manufacturing system that works at pace and can create and use genomes that don’t exist in the natural world.
This can lead to amazing medicines, I mean really amazing.
It also opens the door to terrifying, possibly apocalyptic, bioweapons.
And as ever I’m concerned about unintended consequences.
Here’s a link to the Arc institute for original source:
https://arcinstitute.org/news/evo-2-one-year-later?ref=aisecret.us