Artificial Intelligence has in some senses become a buzz word. It really represents a combination of skills and abilities across a broad spectrum of areas. Just like human intelligence, artificial intelligence is a combination of voice recognition, visual processing, pattern recognition, sensor technologies and now as the world of robotics reaches new levels of sophistication, the physical movement of robots is beginning to resemble human beings.

In the year 2020, it was very difficult to predict that the world would be turned upside down by a man eating a diseased bat. COVID19 is an unprecedented challenge to our entire way of life. The writer of this article has had a long term interest in the field of artificial intelligence and I was curious to find out if this most remarkable of technologies is contributing to solution to the COVID19 problem. Indeed it is in remarkable ways.

The main way that artificial intelligence seems to be contributed to solutions to COVID19 is by making it much easier to model the operation of the virus and quickly find new drugs that can be used to treat the disease and also possibly a vaccine. The way that artificial intelligence does this is by learning from the troves of data now available about COVID19 how it interacts with certain existing treatments and using the knowledge graph which is generated to then predict the areas of research where the development of new drugs is most likely to be fruitful.

Research is also being conducted by Google Deepmind which is a specialised Artificial Intelligence research unit in Google that developed AlphaGo, the AI that beat the human world champion at the boardgame GO. Deepmind is applying machine learning techniques to predict the protein structures generated by certain genetic profiles that will almost certainly be useful in discovering treatments for COVID19 and other diseases as well.

Artificial intelligence is also being used to monitor social media and weed out obvious misinformation which is being spread about the disease. Nefarious actors sometimes aim to confuse the public with the goal in mind of creating chaos and conflict from disputes which emerge about the origins of the virus and its treatments. Social media firms are employing artificial intelligence in an attempt to make social media a place of greater truth and to increase the reliability and trustworthiness of social media as a source of public information.

All of these applications of the remarkable capabilities of artificial intelligence have only become apparent in the course of the COVID19 pandemic. However, it appears certain that the development of these technologies will have a remarkable impact going forward on the ability of human beings to find a path out of this terrible pandemic.

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