Human receives AI-designed virus for the first time
https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/10/22/human-receives-ai-designed-virus-for-the-first-time/5304874Open linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://www.theregister.com/science/2026/10/22/human-receives-ai-designed-virus-for-the-first-time/5304874Open linkView original on lemmy.world
12 replies
This will end poorly.
Clickbait title
"Receives" clues you into that it was part of medical treatment, but I can see you how would read it as clickbait, but I honesly don't think it was intended to be so.
Considering the epigraph being
It does definitely seem intended
Great, but what about mutation? How stable are bacteriophages? Oh, yeah, it doesn’t matter because the transcribing proteins (in the host cell) cause errors that cause the mutations.
Wee… Resident Evil speed run.
True, but it is news that should give us all pause. Imagine what they could do with AI+CRISPR gene editing, which is also a virus. Probably not something good.
Oh, I’m sure they’re smirking at the military applications of such horrors.
Brilliant. As antibiotics becomes useless, those bacteriophages will be next major medical tools.
I'm excited to see what they can do
Yep the only reason modern medicine went the antibiotic route instead of the bacteriophage route was the logistical and clinical challenges in stocking 100 treatments for an infection instead of 1 (or thousands instead of dozens) but now that we can print them on demand, you just have to show the AI an infectious agent or tumor cell and it can just crank out a custom virus that kills it specifically. Won't help with infectious prions or viruses but opens the door to new treatments for those too
That's some Star Trek level bullshit.
We're slowly but surely making each of the star trek technologies. Some of them like the teleporters with a "Heisenberg compensator" component are a little out there of course!