Sophisticated AI tools played a major role in our fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, from developing drugs and vaccines, to aiding medical research, and coordinating healthcare providers. We’ll look at the huge expansion of AI capability in just the last few years, and consider what a pandemic response could look like in 100 years. We’ll talk to a professor and founder of a science competition to use AI to solve the “protein folding problem,” and hear how the new AI system Alphafold helped one biologist solve a decades long problem in half an hour. We’ll also hear from residents of a country that successfully used AI to extinguish the spread of COVID-19, and how Americans could do it, too (but probably won’t).

(Read the transcript for this episode.)