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Thanks to DALL-E, the race to make artificial protein drugs is on
- westcort 4y agoI just hope they are careful not to make new prions. We do not need more things like CJD floating around.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- patates 4y agoWell, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that there will be enough things to eventually reduce us to uniform dust, so, why not give up now? /s
- KidComputer 4y agoThis is the real AI threat. Soon it will be all too easy to engineer novel viral proteins hardened against all known drugs with lethal consequences. You’ll just have to have faith that there’s no deranged grad student out there with genocidal intentions.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- noyoudumbdolt 4y agoThe Great Filter is obviously correct. It eventually becomes trivially easy to make civilization-ending pathogens and weapons, even accidentally. And there is always a deranged grad student or hubristic scientist willing to pull the trigger.
- birdyrooster 4y agobut what if this is just a fantasy and the reality is that you can’t snuff humans out and it’s too late to save the universe from us now. We’re not here to stay the heat death, we’re accelerating it. Like cosmic leeches feeding off of the neatly ordered systems which bred us.
- chrischen 4y agoWe are either the cancer or will have a cancer end us.
- oefrha 4y agoAs a theoretical physicist who has extensively studied but hasn’t directly worked on cosmology: you’re overestimating human impact on the universe by at least 25 orders of magnitude. The entire solar system can explode tomorrow and it would be less impactful to the universe than an ant dying on earth. You’re nothing to the universe, read less doomsday crap.
- _yb2s 4y agoI think you’re missing the previous commenters point. It is implying a speculative future where humans have harnessed a majority of the universe, a la a Dyson sphere on every sun, etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ben_w 4y agoYeah, was going to say the same. Today's humanity is collectively irrelevant to the universe as a whole. But, there's no obvious thing standing in the way of von Neumann probes eating Mercury into a K1 civ, using that to send a wave of colonisation VN probes to every reachable galaxy at the same time, and only then spreading out to each star within each galaxy, then star-lifting each star, and in cosmologically short timescales every star is a red dwarf surrounded by a K1 Dyson swarm. I doubt Dyson swarms can avoid being ground into dust over a "mere" million years, so that's a very different and very dark (literally as well as metaphorically) possible future.
- KidComputer 4y agohttps://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
- xiphias2 4y agoCivilization ending pathogens are impossible, as the internet is always faster in spreading news about it than pathogens, but weapons ending humanity are quite probable even if just a guy in the basement writes to the AI: imagine that you want to end humanity in a virtual world. Use this internet connection to that virtual world.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> the internet is always faster in spreading news about it than pathogens Some pathogens have delayed symptoms - HIV takes years to show itself, BSE takes 4-6. A fast spreading aerosol version of something like this would be… bad.
- xiphias2 4y agoYou're right, I guess we should be thankful that gain of function research was not (yet) done on those.
- ceejayoz 4y agoI'm not inherently opposed to gain of function research. Someone is gonna do gain of function research on pathogens, and it's pretty rapidly becoming something in reach of determined hobbyists, let alone rogue states. I think I'd prefer we understand what's possible, how pathogens vary in deadliness, how they might be modified by less friendly actors, etc., and I'd hope it's not being done in a cavalier fashion with regards to safety.
- pifm_guy 4y agoNearly everyone was exposed to COVID, despite news spreading about it far faster than it spread. COVID only killed under 1% or so of those exposed. But there are plenty of diseases with far higher mortality. What makes you think we couldn't make something as deadly as rabies (kills 99%+ of those who get symptoms) but as transmissible as the common cold?
- 4y ago
- stephanheijl 4y agoDesigning novel viral proteins might become trivial, but actually doing the lab work to produce them would still be a tough exercise. On the other hand, exactly by the mechanism that would give rise to such a novel pathogen, actors that do have access to large manufacturing capabilities would be able to create novel drugs rapidly or even prevantatively.
- KidComputer 4y agoIt’s difficult, but doable and nowhere near as hard as the synthetic chemistry need to produce small molecule therapeutics to fight novel pathogens. The hardest part in my opinion would be getting accurate predictions of protein-protein binding free energies. > create novel drugs rapidly or even prevantatively. On your final point I’m skeptical. Drugs are difficult to design because you need to account for off-target effects among other things. That’s not a concern when designing a harmful agent. Furthermore I presume one could intelligently harden the pathogen so any potential treatment might be as harmful as the pathogen itself. But that’s a strong assumption and I know of no way to formally verify it.
- nisegami 4y ago>You’ll just have to have faith that there’s no deranged grad student out there with genocidal intentions. More common than you'd think
- FieryTransition 4y agoMy guess based on the state of gene editing wrt. bio-weapons, we have been able to do this for a while, I just think the risk/reward ratio of the whole idea, from handling to deployment, is just too great and unpredictable. And it would require a lot of biolab equipment, while not being detected in some way or the other.
- wesleywt 4y agoA lot of fantasy in this thread. No wonder ridiculous stories about "gain of function covid" is so popular on this website. Biology is a lot more complicated than you can ever imagine. A grad student will not make a species ending virus because organisms have been exposed to them since the dawn of time.
- once_inc 4y agoThough I mostly agree with the ridiculousness of the concept "species ending virus", I do think this, combined with advances in medical technology and manufacturing can be a significant threat to the status quo of our highly-connected, just-in-time, centralised-production civilisation. Enough of a threat that I think our species won't breach 10 billion for a considerable amount of time.
- ceejayoz 4y agoWe’ve evolved to deal with the natural rate of pathogen evolution. Not a guided one. Some species have already lost to the natural ones. This is like saying social media isn’t impactful because we can carve thoughts into stone.
- refurb 4y agoHaving solved nearly all protein structures known to biology, As a biologist, “hahaha……no”. The AI might have solved structures according to the rules it’s been told, but are they accurate with what happens in reality? No.
- ipsum2 4y agoCan you expand on the inconsistencies between what the model predicts and reality? I'd love to learn more and see some examples.
- gilleain 4y agoDo you mean examples like trans-membrane proteins where there are fewer experimental models, or inaccuracies in models compared to the structure in solution?
- teshier-A 4y agoOh come on. "Protein structures" almost exclusively means "experimentally determined protein structures". That sentence is correct.
- refurb 4y agoHuh? How do you “solve” experimentally determined protein structures? The AI models were basically trained on those.
- visarga 4y agoThe model is not based on DALL-E, rather it is a simple masked auto-encoder trained unsupervised with tons of protein data. On top there is another transformer trained with supervised 3D data to generate the spatial representation.
- ramraj07 4y agoDavid Bakers lab is using diffusion methods to design new proteins: https://youtu.be/oO-uR_3fL1g https://youtu.be/oO-uR_3fL1g (skip to the diffusion models section but I recommend anyone with biology or AI interest to watch it fully). Also dudes 58. Wow.
- dzdt 4y agoThe comment "Also dudes 58. Wow!" comes across as repulsive ageism. Probably better to delete that.
- bsaul 4y agoMaybe it’s only referring to the fact that the person in the video looks much much younger ?
- ramraj07 4y agoAs the other commenter said, I’m just extremely impressed at how young he looks for his age. Not even sure if you thought I was ageist because he’s too old or too young lol. 58 seems about right for someone who’s achieved as much as he has (perhaps even young).
- fnordpiglet 4y agoTrue, but I read it as “wow even oldsters can use computers” - I think given the social ills in tech adding a modifier like “he looks young for being 58!” would help clarify confusion, both are valid readings depending how cynically you are feeling at the moment. Anyway you’re right he’s super young looking. Must be eating a lot of synthetic AI protein.
- avereveard 4y agothis constant, nonsensical namedropping of DALLE and GPT in unrelated architectures to capture clicks is getting annoying
- amelius 4y agoIs anyone working on making transformers useful for these problems: routing the tracks in a PCB or IC layout, or drawing graphs nicely so that humans can understand them better?
- mansoon 4y agoI thought this was pretty good. https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/toy_model/index.html https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/toy_model/index.html