In this news article by she talks about a new deep-learning artificial intelligence system called AlphaFold. The purpose of this new technology is to predict the 3-D shapes of proteins by recognizing patterns in structures. At its first release in 2021, the AlphaFold included predictions for most known human proteins, with predictions of over 350,000 protein structures. Since its initial release, the AlphaFold database has increased the number of protein structure predictions to over 200 million.
As you can see by the model, some parts of the prediction are more or less accurate than others. One of the main issues with AlphaFold is the fact that these are only predictions. Scientists cannot use this information with full confidence and require further experiments to be able to be confident in the findings. Even with this issue, scientists and researchers have been able to develop potential new vaccines, improve their understanding of diseases, and gain insight into human evolution with this new artificial intelligence system.
As you may remember from your AP Biology class, protein structures are extremely important in allowing the protein to perform its job. Proteins are extremely integral in your body’s ability to function. Enzymes are used to speed up reactions, antibodies protect our body from diseases, hormones send signals to the body, etc. By knowing the structure of the protein, scientists gain a better understanding of how proteins and all of these processes work. Just by changing one amino acid, the whole structure changes which can cause diseases such as Sickle Cell Anemia. If you would like to learn more about other important purposes of protein structure, this article goes into more in-depth on the applications of protein structure and modeling.
Now onto the topic of artificial intelligence as a whole. While artificial intelligence can reduce human error, take risks instead of humans, create unbiased decisions, and automate repetitive actions, it also has several downsides(besides the possibility of it becoming sentient and taking over the world like in movies). Some of these are having high costs, increasing the amount of unemployment, being emotionless, having no morals, and making humans lazier. Artificial intelligence has the potential to completely change society as a whole. I believe that as long as we are able to keep artificial intelligence under control and not let it get into the wrong hands, it will be a great benefit to society through important breakthroughs, such as AlphaFold, and new ideas that would have never been thought of without the use of this technology.
Do you believe artificial intelligence will be the salvation for humanity or will it be its downfall?
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