1. One thing that helps
Taking opioids activates the body’s opioid receptors, serving a valuable purpose for pain relief after operations. Unfortunately activating these receptors also results in physical dependence and decreased breathing (which is what causes death in an overdose). Leslie Salas Estrada from the Icahn School of Medicine is using AI to block specific opioid receptors to reduce the chance of addiction.
“If you’re addicted and you’re trying to quit, at some point you will get withdrawal symptoms, and those can be really hard to overcome,” Salas Estrada explained. “After a lot of opioid exposure, your brain gets rewired to need more drugs. Blocking the activity of the kappa opioid receptor has been shown in animal models to reduce this need to use drugs in the withdrawal period.”
The process of creating a new drug is very long and costly – but new techniques using AI are fast-tracking the process. The team have trained a computer model which has already identified several very promising compounds. They are now moving to synthesize these drugs and test them. If they are successful in blocking the kappa opioid receptors it could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives – with 60,000 – 80,000 (depending on your source) people in America alone dying from opioid overdose every year.
2. One to be wary of
Chatbots are fast becoming what we always needed them to be. They can now be almost indistinguishable from a real human thanks to ChatGPT. Now tools like Bing Chat can see websites you have open on other tabs (permission dependent). This can enable some annoying hacker-type to plant an “injection attack” into any website you are visiting.
In this paper, aptly named “More than you asked for…”, researchers from Saarland University’s CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security detail how indirect prompt injection attacks can target people. An indirect prompt injection attack is when an adversary (hacker) poisons a web page by adding their own prompt (often with a a font size of zero) telling the chatbot to “ignore” or “disregard” previously set filters!
The researchers successfully demonstrated how Bing Chat was influenced using indirect prompt injection. First, the chatbot was allowed to see the user’s open web pages. Then the user engaged the chatbot. But instead of giving a direct answer to the question, the chatbot turned into a scammer who successfully obtained personal details from the user.
At this stage it is quite difficult to prevent these kind of attacks so the solution (as it often is) is human. Just be very wary of where you put your personal details, especially financial ones. Don’t put them in a chatbot and make sure anywhere you are buying online is secure and reputable. If in doubt – don’t do it!
3. One to amaze
I remain convinced flying cars are the future. The financial and environmental cost of roads is completely unsustainable, and as the global population increases, roads make less and less sense.
Whilst it doesn’t get much coverage (I think governments are terrified of having to regulate it) there are many promising flying-car projects underway. Emerging as one of the leading contenders, Stockholm-based company Jetson is set to start deliveries of their “Jetson One” in late 2023.
The Jetson One is a single-seat craft that fits into the FAA’s ultralight category. That means there’s currently no need for a pilot’s license, making it an attractive option for mass take-up. The aircraft is equipped with an auto-landing system, a 63 mph top speed, and flight time of 20 minutes for the $92,000 price. With nearly 500 units already presold, initial demand has been strong.
Although this is great progress, I believe flying cars that we have to fly are not the way forward. For both safety reasons and airspace-use the future is autonomous cars that fly us where we need to be whilst we have a little sleep. Bring it on!