Way to move the goalposts.
If you take that question seriously for a second - AlphaFold doesn’t spew chemicals or drain lakes. It’s a piece of software that runs on GPUs in a data center. The environmental cost is just the electricity it uses during training and prediction.
Now compare that to the way protein structures were solved before: years of wet lab work with X‑ray crystallography or cryo‑EM, running giant instruments, burning through reagents, and literally consuming tons of chemicals and water in the process. AlphaFold collapses that into a few megawatt‑hours of compute and spits out a 3D structure in hours instead of years.
So if the concern is environmental footprint, the AI way is dramatically cleaner than the old human‑only way.
Well, I didn’t literally mean there’d be just a single place. Obviously, once you set that precedent, other places like it would start popping up too. But it’s not obvious to me that this is a bad thing - or at least worse than the alternatives. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with people wanting to live among like-minded people and, in effect, build echo chambers for themselves.
I do think the philosophy behind it is immoral from my perspective, but that’s not really the point. What matters is the concrete effect this ideology has in the real world. And if, in our current cities, we have racists committing racist violence against minorities, then is it really so much worse to just let them all move off into their own little enclave where they can live out their perfect lives without any black people around, if that’s what they want? At least then the rest of us wouldn’t have to deal with them on a daily basis.