The internet is full of designer drugs. Opioids are pretty basic, not thst hard to produce, and available on a mass market scale, though, you don’t need new development for those.
Party drugs, like MDMA, have tons of “experimental” formulae and are available online wherever local laws aren’t prepared to ban them. The side effects are usually the thing people are taking the drugs for in the first place. You want to mess with certain receptors inside the brain, that’s the whole point, and for healthy people, normal doses won’t even have side effects that severe. Whatever drug you may design, people will become resistant to it, start taking more, and overdose.
I don’t think AI is necessary for any of this. The hard part isn’t designing drugs, it’s more about setting up efficient production facilities.
I do not disagree that there are already designer drugs as they have been in the news for over a decade or more. I am more meaning that AI has the ability to instantly discover a whole lot more. I only say this as I have read several papers now where researchers used AI to discover new chemicals (not drugs per se) and they have found more with AI than all the traditional research to date. It is really opening the doors as discoveries are tedious and time consuming which are two areas that AI excels at. I am certain we are going to see a flood of designer drugs that are on another level. I agree though, I would not personally touch them at all as who knows the long term impacts. That said, we are all encountering countless chemicals in the environment that are new and also not well tested so even if you do not do the latest designer drugs, you are still consuming unknown chemicals. That is the harsh reality.
The internet is full of designer drugs. Opioids are pretty basic, not thst hard to produce, and available on a mass market scale, though, you don’t need new development for those.
Party drugs, like MDMA, have tons of “experimental” formulae and are available online wherever local laws aren’t prepared to ban them. The side effects are usually the thing people are taking the drugs for in the first place. You want to mess with certain receptors inside the brain, that’s the whole point, and for healthy people, normal doses won’t even have side effects that severe. Whatever drug you may design, people will become resistant to it, start taking more, and overdose.
I don’t think AI is necessary for any of this. The hard part isn’t designing drugs, it’s more about setting up efficient production facilities.
I do not disagree that there are already designer drugs as they have been in the news for over a decade or more. I am more meaning that AI has the ability to instantly discover a whole lot more. I only say this as I have read several papers now where researchers used AI to discover new chemicals (not drugs per se) and they have found more with AI than all the traditional research to date. It is really opening the doors as discoveries are tedious and time consuming which are two areas that AI excels at. I am certain we are going to see a flood of designer drugs that are on another level. I agree though, I would not personally touch them at all as who knows the long term impacts. That said, we are all encountering countless chemicals in the environment that are new and also not well tested so even if you do not do the latest designer drugs, you are still consuming unknown chemicals. That is the harsh reality.