Organized by ETC Group, African Center for Biodiversity, TWN – Third World Network
The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has for 30 years governed new developments in biotechnology, in the frame of precaution and justice, and has also recently established a process of technology horizon scanning, assessment, and monitoring of new developments.
Now, there is an industrial attempt to converge next-generation genetic engineering tools (synthetic biology) with generative AI (of the sort used by ChatGPT) in a new "generative biology" industry.
- Why the CBD’s expert groups propose an urgent assessment of this newest AI-biotech convergence.
- How the use of generative AI in biology brings thorny new problems stemming from the opaque and error-prone ‘black box’ character of generative AI.
- How the world’s largest digital tech companies (including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and NVIDIA) are fuelling a ‘generative biology rush’, including a bold biopiracy grab of all the world’s digital sequence information on genomic resources.
- What can be done at COP 16 in Cali, Colombia?
Speakers
- Introduction Sabrina Masinjila (ACB)
- An introduction to AI‘Generative Biology: why it raises serious challenges for the CBD Jim Thomas (Scan the horizon)
- AI and Synbio under the Convention on Biological Diversity: process and perspectives Florian Rabitz (Kaunas University of Technology)
- Prof. Dr. Ossama Abdelkawy
- Linking the Convention’s obligations to the need to responsibly assess the integration of AI and SynBio Lim Li Ching (TWN)
- How the industry is using synthetic biology and artificial intelligence to circumvent the CBD, the Cartagena Protocol, and the ITPGRFA Guy Kastler (La Via Campesina)
- Conclusion Sabrina Masinjila (ACB)
Resource
The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) (2024) Black Box Biotech. Integration of Artificial Intelligence with Synthetic Biology: Addressing the risks,hype and inequities underpinning Generative Biology. # 36 pp.
Governments are already scrambling to try to catch up with the side effects, errors, and governance conundrums created by first-generation ‘generative AI’ programs – such as ChatGPT – while discovering the overreach of claims initially made by AI developers.
The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), with three decades of experience tracking global biotechnology policy, is uniquely placed to assess the now-emerging field of ‘generative biology’ and offer sensible advice before AI risks become irrevocably entangled with genetic engineering risks. At the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 16) of the CBD in October and November 2024, governments will have the option to commission a ‘deeper dive’ assessment to better understand the array of policy challenges arising from the rapid integration of AI with SynBio – and to propose how to address those challenges promptly in the frame of precaution and justice. Agreements made at COP 16 on Digital sequence information (DSI) also need to robustly ensure that the digital AI giants now amassing DSI to train generative biology models are firmly covered by requirements concerning commercial utilisation of DSI.
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