This post cobbles together a couple novel usages of AI that are moving humanity forwards. I've read articles related to medicine and technology, but I see other areas that could benefit from AI as well. AI will disrupt the current economies we have running today, it has the ability to siphon even more capital from the working class to those of our oligarchs, but let's explore what areas it can improve our daily lives.
I shared this article from phys.org with my family, and it's a bioengineering miracle of sorts. The AI model was trained to create new proteins with properties that biologists or pharmaceutical scientists can use to help treat different diseases or deliver drugs in new ways. The article concludes with this message:
Using their new method, they were able to produce proteins consisting of up to 1,000 amino acids. "This brings us closer to the size of antibodies, and—just as with antibodies—we can then integrate several desired functions into such a protein," explains Dietz. "These could, for example, be motifs for recognizing and suppressing pathogens."
This is a neat way to use AI. AI can takes swathes of data, datasets that would take a person 10's of thousands of years to read, much less be able to recall. It can look at data in ways we can't even imagine, it lifts up data and transforms it in space and time to solve problems that seem like magic. It's why the messaging of this movement is important. Pandora's box has been unleashed, there is lots of good that can come from this tech if we use it appropriately. But some men want to watch the world burn and we need to remain vigilant and informed so the power structures don't become so much lopsided that we devolve into techno-feudalism.
Another interesting development hits close to home for me as a software developer. Over the past few months at my job, my colleagues and I have been working to squash security vulnerabilities in a legacy application to bring into the cloud. These vulnerabilities are generally found by security researchers testing systems for flaws. Google recently published that they used AI to find a hackable vulnerability in one of the most widely used databases, SQLite. To read more about Google's news, here's the article which goes into further details of their model Big Sleep and what it found. It's a bit technical, but it's showing some real practical applications that will help make a better tomorrow.
I can't say for certain that I know what the future will bring, but there are glimmers of hope speckled into our timeline. Even if there is some issues surrounding use of AI for propaganda, social-engineering, fraud, and the like. This is just the advent of the tech so I really implore you to do a thought exercise and see how AI could impact your profession or daily life. Earlier this year Klarna (an online credit provider) issued a press release stating they've replaced customer support reps with AI chats and are seeing positive results from their internal metrics. For the entrepreneurial this is great news, as it means the market is more democratic. You can scale easily knowing your customer support can scale with you at a cost effective manner. But the flip side is, real people lost their jobs or potential jobs are removed from the job pool. It's all a matter of perspective.
I've shared some ways AI can impact us in a positive sense. It can make new medicine, protect the current infrastructure of the internet as well as creates entrepreneurial landscapes we haven't seen before. But as with any tool or technology, it can be used for progress or abused to such extremes as bludgeoning masses into serfdom. It's really a flip of the coin, and only time will show us how this plays out. Having insights on things that will impact us today as well as the future is important to all of us, so it's why I'm putting this voice out here today.
Please share these posts with your loved ones so we can have informed discussions of what we see and hear around us. Digital life is going to become much more tricky to navigate, more so than it has been in the past. I hope my research in this area will yield fruitful endevours to help stop the poisoning of the well, but I'm just one person.
Isaac