Have you heard the rumor about human “organ banks” where people can just swap out an ailing heart, liver, or spleen? I saw something like this in the prophetic AI 2027 essay, an epic broadside by Daniel Kokotajlo and company, about AI ushering in an era of design where human biology gets boosted by the work of inference models. It’s just one of many examples of the world’s potential to change radically – but it’s also illustrative of something important when it comes to natural biological systems. Working on Improvement I was reading this post at OpenAI called Preparing for Future AI Capabilities in Biology, where writers try to project the impact of artificial intelligence in this sphere, writing: “Advanced AI models have the power to rapidly accelerate scientific discovery, one of the many ways frontier AI models will benefit humanity. In biology, these models are already helping scientists identify which new drugs are most likely to succeed in human trials. Soon, they could also accelerate drug discovery, design better vaccines, create enzymes for sustainable fuels, and uncover new treatments for rare diseases to open up new possibilities across medicine, public health, and environmental science.” They also mention the risks: “At the same time, these models raise important dual-use considerations: enabling scientific advancement while maintaining the barrier to harmful information. The same underlying capabilities driving progress, such as reasoning over biological data, predicting chemical reactions, or guiding lab experiments, could also potentially be misused to help people with minimal expertise to recreate biological threats or assist highly skilled actors in creating bioweapons. Physical access to labs and sensitive materials remains a barrier—however those barriers are not absolute.” The OpenAI piece calls for proactive work on safety and guardrails, citing an executive order on the issue, but one point that I