Artificial Intelligence can do a lot of things, but it apparently can't make humanity any smarter. Because if human beings had actual intelligence, they would not be programming AI to come up with new diseases.
Now, there's a "Cold" War brewing. This one isn't about nuclear arms; it's about viruses. A terrifying new report says that researchers have used AI to design 16 new viruses.
"Slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth."
This was H.G. Wells' ominous phrase about viruses that were able to overwhelm an alien race, and thus, win the "War of the Worlds."
While it is natural for human beings to revolt against revolutionary technology, the way researchers are using AI to develop new viruses is giving people the chills.
At Stanford University (home of that lovely Prison Experiment), researchers have tasked AI to come up with novel viruses. The BBC picked up on this millenarian story.
It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI.
The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people.
The breakthrough has been labelled a "very significant turning point" in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise "urgent" safety and security concerns.
It wasn't enough that AI designed these new viruses. No, the students had to create them in a lab. Of course.
The Stanford researchers picked the most promising 302 AI designs and synthesised them in the lab. Of these, 16 proved effective at killing E. coli bacteria.
Sounds wonderful. Who doesn't hate E. coli?
But if you are recalling the testimony of one Dr. Anthony Fauci and his remarks on "not-gain-of-function" research, you might be putting two and two together right now.
Unlike Big Brother's pronouncements in "1984," that happens to equal four.
The viral research that was taking place at the Wuhan laboratory, funded by Dr. Fauci's NIAID through its cut-out EcoHealth Alliance, was undoubtedly sold as beneficial to mankind.
READ MORE: Despite RFK Jr.'s Opposition, FDA Approves First mRNA Flu Vaccines
At the Wuhan Institute for Virology, it appears likely the researchers made the frankenvirus SARS-CoV-2.
WIV (notably the "bat lady" Shi Zhengli’s group) extensively collected, sequenced, and experimentally manipulated bat SARS-related coronaviruses (sarbecoviruses).
This included creating chimeric viruses (e.g., swapping spike proteins onto SARS backbones) and reverse-genetics work on bat CoVs. Closely related sequences such as RaTG13 (~96% identical overall to SARS-CoV-2) came from WIV collections
ALSO SEE: Dr. Fauci's Testimony to Rand Paul on 'Gain-of-Function' Research Was Filled With, Well, Lies
It also appears that the researchers had a "blueprint" to make a novel virus. Sound familiar? Here is what U.S. Right to Know uncovered:
American scientists planned to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to engineer novel coronaviruses with the features of SARS-CoV-2 the year before the virus emerged from that city, according to documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know.
While rare in nature, these features were central to the esoteric research interests of the scientists working with the Wuhan lab, those documents show.
Scientists divided over the so-called “lab leak” and natural origin hypotheses have for years pored over the arcane language of a U.S.-China research proposal called “DEFUSE” describing coronavirus engineering experiments.
The DEFUSE grant proposal was led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.
Here's the part that should make you point at the screen like Leo DiCaprio in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
Now, drafts and notes uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act reveal fresh details about the intended research.
Specifically, the scientists sought to insert furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein; to assemble synthetic viruses in six segments; to identify coronaviruses up to 25 percent different from SARS; and to select for receptor binding domains adept at infecting human receptors.
The genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, matches the viruses described in the research proposal:
SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site positioned in the spike protein at the S1/S2 junction. The furin cleavage site supercharged the virus into the worst pandemic pathogen in a century. Virologists have yet to identify one in any other related coronavirus.
Now, that, as they say, is one hell of a coincidence. Here's another one: Dr. Ralph Baric wanted to crank out about 20 of these frankenviruses.
This American virologist, University of North Carolina Prof. Ralph Baric, was set to engineer twenty or more “chimeric” SARS-related viral spike proteins per year of the proposal, and two to five full-length engineered SARS-related viruses. Documents previously reported by U.S. Right to Know show that some of the experimentation could secretly occur in Wuhan at a lower biosafety level than specified in the grant, apparently to save costs.
As noted by The Daily Telegraph, "The previously reported DEFUSE grant proposal, led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak in New York, was a 2018 application to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a USD $14 million grant to enhance SARS-like bat viruses."
“If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team,” Daszak wrote in the grant notes.
“Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan," he added.
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes, or even Dr. Watson for that matter, to connect the dots.
By the way, the grant proposal was submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which rejected the project. Baric, nonetheless, engineered unknown spike proteins by the time the proposal was submitted.
The point of this trip down memory-holed lane is that human beings don't actually seem to be learning from the horrible COVID pandemic experience.
The scientific establishment in America is still approving mRNA vaccines (bugs and all), and it is now trying to create more unnatural viruses that you don't see in nature.
Incidentally, in a commentary accompanying the publication in the journal Science, Dr. Thomas Inglesby and Dr. Moritz Hanke from the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University wrote the findings raise "urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions."
The scientists said it is no longer a question of "whether generative viral genome design will exist" but whether it can be used without "enabling serious harm".
They added that new viruses with the potential to cause disease "should not be pursued."
Where have we heard that one before?
