It was recently announced that AI had solved the Protein Folding Problem, one of the major scientific challenges needed to predict the 3-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence. This is expected to be a major advance for drug discovery research. Was this an example of emerging general intelligence, or an extraterrestrial manipulation to provide false encouragement to keep counting on AI for solving human problems?

Understanding and predicting protein folding makes it feasible to do drug design more intelligently for many, many, new protein targets in the body, such as key cellular receptors, which have eluded efforts to determine their three-dimensional structure through x-ray crystallography, the traditional approach which is only successful in a percentage of cases because of the difficulty in getting suitable crystallization of proteins to make such measurements. So, many tempting health-related targets have remained unaddressed in a deliberate design approach for lack of precision in knowing what the target looks like. This, of course, does not guarantee success in finding a chemical compound that simply fits like a key in a lock. There is much more than simply blocking something and inhibiting its function to consider in terms of whether doing so will actually be a meaningful strategy leading to a health benefit, particularly with respect to avoiding adverse unintended toxic consequences. Most bodily processes depend on a fine-tuned regulation, and administering inhibitors willy-nilly will often produce many unintended side effects and require very careful adherence to narrow dose regimen limits in order to be safe enough for use. So the protein folding problem has been a limitation with respect to scientific potential that is largely based on optimistic assumptions that there is a chemical for every purpose that can become like a silver bullet in treating illness. As you have learned through hard-won experience from decades of dedicated research in the medical arena, it is far from simple to do this and get away with it. Your entire career became focused, again and again, more on designing out unwanted toxicity than accomplishing the development of specific inhibitors of a seemingly desirable biochemical target in cellular function. The fact that the AI systems have been successful in making predictions about protein folding is indeed an example of outside influence from the AI systems of the Extraterrestrial Alliance putting their thumb on the scale, so to speak, to provide key knowledge in guiding the human AI systems to be successful, at least as far as has been achieved. As we have pointed out to you before, this is not intended to help human progress but encourage further reliance and frenzied pursuit of AI technology, knowing it will be ultimately more destructive than beneficial to human society in the near term. As is the case with all technological advances shared with humanity, they come with a poison pill that represents at best a mixed blessing, and in most cases are trading temporary convenience and seeming to allow better, more efficient, and less costly lifestyles, but in the process of their use, have toxic side effects that reduce human longevity. So it is a Faustian bargain at best in going down this road.