When All Research Is Dual Use

Governing new biosecurity threats is not merely a matter of good intentions and better training; it requires a paying proper attention to the social contexts of science. In a Mar 2022 paper in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers from a US pharmaceutical company who were building artificial inte...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIssues in science and technology Vol. 38; no. 3; pp. 84 - 87
Main Author Evans, Sam Weiss
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Washington Issues in Science and Technology 01.04.2022
Subjects
Algorithms
Artificial intelligence
Beliefs
Biological & chemical weapons
Biosecurity
Biotechnology
Chemical weapons
Ebola virus
Educational Change
Freedom
Governance
Industrial Structure
Innovation
International security
Mythology
National security
Neurotoxins
Pathogens
Pharmaceutical industry
R&D
Research & development
Research and Development
Researchers
Science
Scientific Principles
Scientists
Security
Social Environment
Social Systems
Society
Toxicity
Toxins
Viruses
United States > US
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Summary:Governing new biosecurity threats is not merely a matter of good intentions and better training; it requires a paying proper attention to the social contexts of science. In a Mar 2022 paper in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers from a US pharmaceutical company who were building artificial intelligence systems for virtual drug discovery issued a wake-up call to their colleagues. After years of working on a suite of models to improve toxicity prediction, the researchers were invited to an international security conference to give a presentation on how such models could be misused to create chemical and biological weapons--something they had not previously considered, even though they had worked with neurotoxins and Ebola.
ISSN:0748-5492
1938-1557