As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the biological sciences, it is pushing the future of biology in two opposing directions. AI can help bad actors generate recipes for biological weapons with just a few keystrokes and computational prompts. At the same time, AI can track disease outbreaks and deliver critical public health information to millions of people in real time – potentially stopping a deadly outbreak in its tracks. What we are dealing with in this moment is profound: a race between offense and defense. Between the proliferation of dark biology, where deadly pathogens are engineered in secret, and the promise of a new era of collective global health.
Every infectious disease outbreak begins with a handful of cases. Public health wins by learning about an outbreak before it spreads wide, before hospitals fill and a crisis starts to spiral out of control. As transmission rates explode, options shrink. One of AI’s greatest values is its ability to compress the timeline between outbreak and detection. Speed can mean the difference between containing an outbreak and confronting an epidemic, or another global pandemic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) now uses AI to track the spread of infectious disease. At the WHO’s Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, in Berlin, Germany, computational systems leverage artificial intelligence and pathogenic surveillance to track and monitor infectious disease outbreaks around the world. At the center of this new way forward sits a computer-based system called Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources, or Eios (“EE-oss”), which acts as a giant filter for the world’s minute-by-minute health information.
For decades, traditional epidemic intelligence has relied on official case counts. But data from hospitals, labs, research groups and other formal reporting systems takes days or weeks to register and input into official databases. Eios leverages the colossal power of modern computing and social media to get a more immediate picture of a disease outbreak. Eios focuses on unofficial reports, citizen chatter, local news reports, social media posts and more. Proficient across multiple languages, Eios scans millions of websites, feeds and platforms, searching for outbreaks as they happen. It scrapes, filters and ranks information. The goal of Eios is to pull signal from noise.
AI is a force multiplier, changing the biological sciences every day. The real question is not whether AI can do catastrophic harm in the realm of biological sciences – it most certainly can – but whether public health officials can figure out how to deploy AI as a defensive tool faster than malicious actors deploy it as an offensive one.
The offensive potential is no longer theoretical. AI systems can already help researchers navigate enormous bodies of biological knowledge that once required years of specialized training. They can explain complex laboratory techniques,…
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