When Dr Sean Ekins was asked to deliver a speech to experts on dangers of AI, he asked his computer with machine learning capacity, which was developed to design pharmaceutical active molecules for medical treatments, to design toxic molecules.
Overnight, his supposedly life-saving machinery had come up with ideas for 40,000 chemical weapons, many of them more lethal than the deadly VX and Novichok.
With AI, we are essentially creating non-human intelligence that is very unpredictable. It also gets more and more powerful – so where are the red lines we are going to draw on how we are going to use it?