It has been a year since we started living in a Covid-19 reality. During this period, each of us has reevaluated and recapped the world from a different perspective. The unknown follows us, puzzling and questioning our ability to make the right decisions.
Today, all humanity is being drafted into war with the pandemic, and AI is a powerful weapon to tackle Covid-19. AI is an essential tool of our ‘new normal’. It enables the development of chatbots providing 24/7 client support, accelerates Covid-19 vaccine development, and solves analytics tasks for financial services offering high speed, accuracy, and efficiency. All of these essential functions mentioned above make AI one of the long-lasting trends of our new life.
Historic retrospective shows us that it takes time to develop vaccines. Unfortunately, society cannot waste any time prolonging vaccine development. One of the possible ways to accelerate the process of vaccine development is to use artificial intelligence. A vast majority of countries have already implemented machine learning to control the Covid-19 outbreak. There are a lot of mobile apps that help people discover the spread of the disease. The practical use of AI is enormous as it helps to detect anomalies and develop disease management tools.
We live in an incredible world where technology can predict almost everything, including our consumer preferences. In the future, AI can rapidly spark powerful innovations in healthcare. It might move the needle in the way of telling a patient that he is sick before he even feels the symptoms. Thus, it can become a game-changing moment for society as AI gives many people around the world a chance to live by providing them with a sustainable and in-time treatment, way before the illness can be diagnosed. This intersection of AI and science is fascinating to discover.
To guide and take a closer look at vaccine design, companies must adapt to the everyday changes and implement AI transformation. For example, BioNTech and InstaDeep created an AI innovation lab in Europe designed to accelerate Covid-19 vaccine development, cancer treatment, and infectious diseases prevention. InstaDeep is the best-tuned AI startup that helped many companies such as Intel, Nvidia, and others to deliver the best software solution. BioNTech is a German biotechnology company that works in cooperation with Pfizer. The partnership of BioNTech and InstaDeep includes three aspects of development:
●novel drug design
●advanced analytics
●supply chain optimization
Novel drug design is aimed at improving the quality of novel vaccines and implementing InstaDeep design algorithms. Advanced analytics is focused on in-depth analysis of patients’ data and predicting biomarkers using machine learning. Supply chain optimization’s main idea is to optimize manufacturing and supply chain processes, providing an effective drug logistic system through AI implementation.
These research aspects can bring us closer to a bright future without Covid-19.
AI can accelerate Covid-19 vaccine development through the use of molecular simulations. This process is complicated and time-consuming. Machine learning can enhance simulation processes with the help of the compounds’ exploration resulting in Covid-19 treatment.
Although AI can speed up the Covid-19 vaccination drive, won’t it mean total control of people’s lives? Much patients’ data will be used to prevent, estimate, and predict the methods’ development to create a vaccine for Covid-19. Society still concerns personal privacy. In 2020, we witnessed Facebook facing a lawsuit about data privacy violations. In trying to drive sales and predict customer preferences, sometimes companies use AI to spy for users instead of brainstorming the right strategy. Eventually, it can lead to losing trust among users. And the lost confidence in the tech world can have unpredictable consequences, including disappointment in AI and vaccine development.
Let us imagine that artificial intelligence facilitated the process of vaccine creation. A safe and efficient vaccine was discovered. One of the central questions of this hypothesis is people will believe in this vaccine? Will they take a shot and find their chances to get the vaccine? How can they trust science after knowing that AI collected their data?
There is one more critical issue we should point out. Both humans and machines can make mistakes, significantly influencing correct data transmission. Errors made by both humans and machines can lead to a significant number of biases in data sets. If we compare the number of these biases made by humans and machines, of course, machines make much fewer errors than humans.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a leading Roman philosopher, once stated:
“Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum”
In English, it is more likely to have the interpretation of:
“To err is human, but to persist (in the mistake) is diabolical.”
Seneca believed that to err is a part of every human being. It has become a natural act of human life, but according to the philosopher, being blind towards the mistakes you make is an act of crime.
Do you know that Artificial Intelligence can learn from its mistakes? There are various AI types, incorporating Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Attitudinal Data. Machine learning is a type of AI focused on learning from mistakes machines make. It is a crucial part of the group mechanism built in their algorithm. Simultaneously, it is an individual approach lying in the human being algorithm of learning from the mistakes.
We are already aware that AI is prone to making mistakes the same as humans do. The only differences are the number of errors and the ability to learn from mistakes. In Covid-19 vaccine development, there is no guarantee that either AI or a person being in charge of vaccine testing will not make any errors. Thus, the number of mistakes made by robots and humans can disrupt data algorithms of vaccine development. However, humans are in charge of making the right decisions and focusing on smart goals. Artificial intelligence can help achieve the goal, while human intelligence aims to manage and control vaccine development.
Another question is the cost of the investment to build the working system of data sets. To incorporate AI into the Covid-19 vaccine process acceleration, companies or the government should invest in research and development. Companies should take a financial risk to enhance the development of the Covid-19 vaccine, while the outcome of this process is uncertain.
There are still many concerns about Artificial Intelligence, helping to discover a vaccine for Covid-19. But there is one thing sure: AI empowering human intelligence can speed up the drive of Covid-19 vaccination and eventually win an overwhelming battle of humanity against coronavirus.