AI & mRNA Tie the Knot

Two "new frontiers" that are supposed to "transform humanity" join forces.

There’s a great scene in Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, when the wealthy young heiress, Margot Beste-Chetwynde (a thinly veiled caricature of ocean liner heiress Nancy Cunard) acquires and demolishes what is universally regarded as the most beautifully intact Tudor manor house in all of England.

To replace this historical masterpiece, she hires a young and handsome aspiring architect from Hamburg, Germany named Professor Otto Silenus. I believe that Waugh’s description of Otto is the funniest thing I have ever read:

It was Otto Friedrich Silenus's first important commission. 'Something clean and square', had been Mrs Beste-Chetwynde's instructions, and then she had disappeared on one of her mysterious world-tours, saying as she left: 'Please see that it is finished by the spring.'

Professor Silenus—for that was the title by which this extraordinary young man chose to be called—was a 'find' of Mrs Beste-Chetwynde's. He was not yet very famous anywhere, though all who met him carried away deep and diverse impressions of his genius. He had first attracted Mrs Beste-Chetwynde's attention with the rejected design for a chewing-gum factory which had been reproduced in a progressive Hungarian quarterly. His only other completed work was the décor for a cinema-film of great length and complexity of plot—a complexity rendered the more inextricable by the producer's austere elimination of all human characters, a fact which had proved fatal to its commercial success. He was starving resignedly in a bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, despite the untiring efforts of his parents to find him—they were very rich in Hamburg—when he was offered the commission of rebuilding King's Thursday. 'Something clean and square'—he pondered for three hungry days upon the aesthetic implications of these instructions, and then began his designs.

'The problem of architecture as I see it,' he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferro-concrete and aluminium, 'is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,' he said gloomily; 'please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.'

This morning I was reminded of this scene as I was reading about the aspirations and fortunes of the San Francisco company, OpenAI. According to Wikipedia:

OpenAI is a U.S. based artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."

In many respects, the history of economic advancement has been about developing machines that are far more efficient than human laborers with simple tools. Consider how much more work a diesel-powered excavator can do than even a thousand strong men equipped with picks and shovels. And so, the rise of AI strikes me as inevitable, and it probably will transform labor in many extraordinary (and unforeseen ways).

A concerning development in the rise of AI is the increasing talk of pairing it with immunological product development such as mRNA vaccines.

On March 8, Open AI announced the appointment of new board members:

OpenAI announces new members to board of directors

Note the resume of Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann.

Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann is a non-profit leader and physician. Dr. Desmond-Hellmann currently serves on the Boards of Pfizer and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. She previously was a Director at Proctor and Gamble, Meta (Facebook), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research institute. She served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2014 to 2020. From 2009-2014 she was Professor and Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the first woman to hold the position. She also previously served as President of Product Development at Genentech, where she played a leadership role in the development of the first gene-targeted cancer drugs. 

See also Moderna’s statement about all the great stuff it’s doing with AI:

Moderna, Powered by AI: Our Journey to Becoming a Real-Time AI Organization

See also this paper outlining how “COVID-19 Vaccine” development was accelerated by AI:

Artificial Intelligence-Based Data-Driven Strategy to Accelerate Research, Development, and Clinical Trials of COVID Vaccine

See also the following paper recently published in Nature.

‘Remarkable’ AI tool designs mRNA vaccines that are more potent and stable

Or this report:

What really concerns me about this development is that the human beings who are driving it possess far greater understanding of algorithms and computers than they do of their fellow human beings. Pondering this reminds me of when I lived in Menlo Park, California and occasionally found myself trying to have a dinner conversation with Silicon Valley engineers. They are certainly some of the smartest people on earth when it comes to math and electronic engineering, but many of them (though not all) are downright stupid when it comes to pondering the human condition.

Consider that the headquarters of Open AI is located in San Francisco. Not so long ago, San Francisco was widely regarded as one of the most beautiful cities on earth and also one of its greatest tourist destinations. Since 2020, the city has become synonymous with urban blight, homelessness and crime combined with out of control housing costs and inflation. This disaster is now so obvious that even CNN is reporting it.

In other words, some of the smartest guys in the world who are developing truly transformative technologies live in a place that fails to maintain basic standards of law, order, and even public sanitation.

Likewise, all of the clever guys who developed mRNA technology have, it seems to me, barely scratched the surface in their understanding of the human immune system. Much of their modeling of how the body responds to viral proteins—naturally occurring and lab-produced—strikes me as downright crude.