AI Created New Viruses — What It Means for COVID, Medicine, and the Future

Apparently, AI is no longer satisfied writing your emails and doing your child's homework.

Now it's making viruses.

But put on the brakes here.

These viruses infect bacteria, not human beings.

Viruses that infect bacteria are called phages or bacteriophages.

And science used AI to design these viruses, and when they tried to design them, they designed hundreds of them, but most of these designs did nothing.

As one would expect, viruses are complicated things.

But there were sixteen of these that worked.

Sixteen functioning viruses.

Now, there is a real-world reason we might want to develop a virus that infects bacteria.

Think about food poisoning.

We just had a severe case with cyclospora, and about the only effective antibiotic for it was Bactrim or sulfa-based antibiotic, for which a number of people have an allergy to.

Imagine if you develop E. Coli or salmonella and it has become resistant to all of the antibiotics we have.

That is not far from our imagination.

But if we can then build a designer virus that will infect that particular E. Coli or salmonella and take care of that infection, we now have a new weapon in our armamentarium.

Of course, there's also the frightening part.

If artificial intelligence can design a virus that affects bacteria, the obvious question is: could we someday use AI to design a virus that infects human beings? The answer is yes.

Not with what was done in this experiment.

These researchers deliberately work with a very simple virus, not a virus that infects humans.

But the technology is moving quickly, and this is something we are going to have to watch very carefully.

But this matters in terms of the COVID argument, because for nearly seven years, I have heard conspiracy people tell me that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates and scientists in Wuhan designed the virus that caused the COVID infection.

Here's the important point.

We did not have the technology in 2019 to design and build a new virus.

We have it now, but we didn't then.

But could a coronavirus that was from a bat or another animal that was being studied in Wuhan escape from the lab? Absolutely.