Austin Seraphin

What AI has done so far: MEDICINE • Helped paralysed people speak again. (Brain implants turn intended speech into words, even recreating their own voice.) • Helped a paralysed man stand and walk again. (A brain–spine interface let him control his legs by thinking.) • Helped blind people read and understand the world around them. (Describing surroundings, reading labels and identifying objects through a phone camera.) • Uncovered cancers doctors would otherwise have missed. (29% higher breast cancer detection in a major study.) • Identified antibiotic candidates that kill drug-resistant bacteria. (Abaucin targeted a dangerous superbug in lab and animal tests.) LEARNING • Made personalised learning available on demand. (An ‘Einstein’ as your personal tutor whenever you want to learn.) • Helped students learn twice as much in less time. (A custom AI tutor outperformed an active-learning Harvard physics class.) • Helped people write, code, design and build without years of specialist training. SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY • Predicted the structures of over 200 million proteins. (Opening new paths to understanding disease and developing medicines.) • Discovered planets hidden in telescope data. (Including Kepler-90i, the eighth planet in a distant solar system.) • Recovered ancient writing buried by Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago. (Reading inside carbonised scrolls too fragile to unroll.) • Begun unlocking how animals communicate. (Patterns in whale calls. Evidence that elephants use individual, name-like calls.) • Produced a proposed solution to one of mathematics’ hardest problems. (Navier–Stokes: 10,000 AI agents, 88 hours, according to OpenAI.) ENVIRONMENT • Predicted where a hurricane would strike nine days before landfall. (GraphCast forecast Hurricane Lee’s Nova Scotia landfall about three days ahead of conventional forecasts.) • Engineered enzymes that break down plastic in hours rather than centuries. • Detected wildfires before the first emergency call. (Spotting smoke and alerting firefighters earlier.) • Slashed the weedkiller farmers need by targeting weeds individually. (35% less herbicide in sugarcane trials, with nearly the same weed control.) ENERGY • Advanced the science of clean fusion energy. (Controlling and shaping superheated plasma inside an experimental fusion machine.) • Driven a generational wave of investment in carbon-free energy, from nuclear power to solar and wind. (Microsoft’s Brookfield deal alone targets over 10.5 GW of new renewable capacity by 2030.) TRANSPORT • Delivered dramatically safer driverless journeys. (Waymo: 81% fewer injury crashes per mile than human drivers in the areas studied.) • Given people who cannot drive a new way to travel independently. (Including blind passengers and older people who cannot drive.) JOBS AND GROWTH • Fuelled an investment boom. (AI-related investment categories accounted for an estimated 37% of U.S. growth in the first nine months of 2025.) • Driven demand for the skilled trades building AI infrastructure. (Electricians, welders, construction crews and cooling specialists.) WHAT AI HAS NOT DONE • Replaced all the radiologists. Guess what? We still need more of them. • Used a community’s water. Golf courses use more. (U.S. golf irrigation: roughly 550bn gallons in 2020. Data centres’ direct consumption: 17bn in 2023. Microsoft’s next-generation designs consume zero water for cooling.) • Raised everyone’s household electricity bills. (Oregon’s PGE: residential bills cut 1.3% after shifting costs to data centres. Indiana’s I&M: proposed household savings of roughly $100 a year, supported by large-customer growth.) • Demonstrated that it wants to kill us all.