DeepMind: unlocking the secrets of life
In many ways, the tech revolution has been a great disappointment, said Harry de Quetteville in The Daily Telegraph. “Amazingly bad”, in fact. We think that technology moves at lightning speed today, but just compare the advances made in, say, the life of the late Queen Mother with those in the life of her great-grandson Prince William.
In her first 40 years, “she got refrigeration, stoves, antibiotics, cars, flight, tractors, telephones, televisions”. Genuinely “game-changing stuff”. And what does Prince William have that she didn’t? “He can order a burger from his phone”, and post a picture of it on Instagram when it arrives. Once in a while, though, our computer-driven world takes a giant leap into the future. One of those moments was revealed last week, when the UK artificial intelligence company DeepMind announced that its algorithms could predict how a protein forms into a three-dimensional shape.
“On the surface the news seemed rather mundane,” said The Guardian. But proteins are “key building blocks of life”, which are involved in all biological processes. Our metabolism is regulated by a protein, insulin. “Cancer is traced to an overproduction of proteins.” Misshapen proteins cause deadly diseases, and play a role in ageing. And a protein’s function is entirely determined by its shape. Human proteins fold up hundreds of amino acids in an astonishing number of ways: “about a googol cubed or ten to the power of 300”. In the past, scientists have spent years trying to work out how single proteins are formed, said Ewen Callaway in Nature. Now, using DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI program, the work can be done in days. This is only the beginning, but it is a “gargantuan” breakthrough. “This will change medicine,” says the evolutionary biologist Prof Andrei Lupas. “It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.”
DeepMind is the brainchild of Demis Hassabis, a British former chess champion whose ambition in life is “to solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else”. He seems genuinely altruistic, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. But I can’t help being disturbed by the fact that DeepMind is owned by Google – which is “first and foremost in the business of amassing data”. It makes money from knowing who we are and what we do. Clearly this is an amazing discovery. But bluntly, “how much power over humanity’s future” are we happy for tech giants such as Google to have? “How much is too much? Is anyone watching? Does anyone care?”