The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

But by far the most important application of AI to medicine in 2020 was the key role it played in designing safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time. On January 11, 2020, Chinese authorities released the virus’s genetic sequence.11 Moderna scientists got to work with powerful machine-learning tools that analyzed what vaccine would work best against it, and just two days later they had created the sequence for its mRNA vaccine.12 On February 7 the first clinical batch was produced. After preliminary testing, it was sent to the National Institutes of Health on February 24. And on March 16—just sixty-three days after sequence selection—the first dose went into a trial participant’s arm. Before the pandemic, vaccines typically took five to ten years to develop. Achieving this breakthrough so quickly surely saved millions of lives.