The thought of an AI designing chemical weapons in a short amount of time is frightening. Regardless of whether it is just an experiment, a large picture of threats, chaos, and war comes to mind. To combat chemical threats at the national and international levels, strategy, ethical guidelines, research, training, assessment, agreement, and prevention are required.
An AI designing a nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic chemical nerve agents developed in the 20th century. Scientists at Collaboration Pharmaceuticals Inc. used a MegaSun2, a commercial molecule generator guided by a machine learning model, to target human diseases by locating new healing inhibitors. They reversed the logic to see what would happen. They guided the generator to reward the finding of toxicity and activity of the goal instead of rewarding only when the activity of the target was found. They also chose the nerve agent VX. The AI was not trained to learn and create new models based on the datasets scientists used.
An unexpected result was shown. The AI not only designed a copy of VX but also 40,000 chemical weapons in less than 6 hours. These molecules were designed to be equally plausible as the structures in publicly available chemical databases. However, they were deemed to be more dangerous than known chemical warfare agents based on the value of the medium lethal dosage.
Questions were raised regarding ethics, the level of impact and resolution based on this study. One solution was to follow the procedure of using GPT-3, a language model that uses internet data to generate text equivalent to human writing. It had an API for public use and some restrictions on a waitlist to prevent misuse of GPT-3. Either way, discussions beyond multiple disciplines and traditional boundaries are needed in order to look into various perspectives and mindsets about this topic. In an interview with The Verge, Fabio Urbina, a senior scientist at Collaboration Pharmaceuticals Inc., pointed out a real-threat to the experiment. He explained how easy it was for others to do the same experiment as they did.
The use of technology to produce known and unknown chemical molecules in a short amount of time will be a challenge in the future. Countries that support terrorism will seize technology that designs chemical weapons. They will then use it to negotiate their deal, suppress human rights, and launch terrorist attacks, while countries that do not support terrorism will also try to stop them. This is the same for non-state actors. They can quickly obtain certain dual-use chemical elements to create chemical threats.
Chemical threats have happened, targeting the military, political enemies, and the general public. The Interpreter noted that the Syrian government and Islamic State used toxic chemicals, from sarin to chlorine bombs to mustard gas. The half-brother of Kim Jong-um, Kim Jong-nam, was assassinated with the use of the nerve agent VX. The Russians also used other known and unknown Novichok nerve agents for assassination. Non-state actors, such as the July 29, 2017 incident in Sydney, used cyber coaches to carry out terrorist operations and attacks.
An article titled “A Weapons of Mass Destruction Strategy for the 21st Century” from War on the Rocks addressed three questions and provided suggestions that would help counter WMD: today’s definition of the term “Weapon of Mass Destruction,” the challenges, and countering the risk level. The authors explain that weapons needed to be included in the term as technology and chemical production increased. It needed to have more than one strategy to prevent WMD being used by state and non-state actors. Furthermore, the U.S. government should also provide a guiding strategy and necessary measures to counter WMD challenges ahead and prepare for what needs to be done.
A list of recommendations to protect countries and civilians from chemical weapons. This listing ranged from agreement evaluations to CWC, protocols, standards, open supply evaluation guidelines, reassessment of diagnostic objectives, and emergency reaction planning.
The Collaboration Pharmaceuticals, Inc. experiment demonstrates the negative aspects of AI rather than the positive. It creates a more complex social environment and poses cybersecurity threats to society and civilians. A contingency plan is needed to address many of the underlying issues related to this topic, in addition to convergence research. Such studies consist of coverage and practices, chemistry, AI, and different fields that might be encouraged to reframe present-day strategies, policies, training, and plenty more.
Sources:
An AI designed to find new drugs created 40,000 potential chemical weapons in less than 6 hours
