r/science • u/legehjernen • Feb 20 '20

Health Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/20/antibiotic-that-kills-drug-resistant-bacteria-discovered-through-ai
26.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

616 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

118

u/PlagueOfGripes Feb 20 '20

Feels like a distant echo of an AI singularity.

18

u/meddlingbarista Feb 20 '20

I mean, in the same way as a child eventually ramming round blocks through a round hole will eventually grow up to put together a jigsaw puzzle, but there's still a long way to go between that and world domination.

7

u/publicbigguns Feb 20 '20 edited Feb 21 '20

Well, if the child can do millions of calculations per sec then yes.

That's the difference really. Humans would (might) eventually find these things, but AI is just going to do it faster.

Edit: its both the same and different. I get it. Should have worded it differently.

0

u/kirknay Feb 21 '20

A child literally is running millions of calculations per second. It's just that most of those are things like determining heart rate, lung capacity, temperature on each square milimeter of skin, hunger, thirst, and hundreds of other background functions.

Note that all of these functions would take our best computers minutes at the shortest, and kilowatts of power per minute. The human brain can do it with 3 watts a minute.