What if we could change an insect’s decision to land?

When an insect lands on humans, it can mean malaria. When an insect lands on crops, it means eating and egg-laying and 20% of all global crops lost.

And, today, in our age of rapid gains in intelligence, malaria is resurgent and insects are reducing global crop yields more than at anytime before. Our tools are not working: insects evolve faster than the insecticide industry can formulate, and when that industry’s business model is built on an insect landing, they are accepting massive crop losses and risk of disease transmission.

Changing trillions of insects’ decisions to land requires a different approach. It’s a technically more challenging approach, but answering it could be one of humanity’s most important achievements.

It requires an array of disciplines, from machine learning to computer vision and chemical ecology, insect biology and insect neuroscience. It means taking advantage of the rapid gains in machine intelligence by removing its bottleneck to real-world progress: behavioral data. AI can read everything humanity has written about mosquitoes and other insects and still cannot know how an untested compound will change a decision of this living animal. We have to run the experiments.

To accelerate the answer means more openness and rapid sharing, a Human Genome Project-like effort with thousands of scientists generating behavioral data that becomes training data for increasingly capable predictive models. It means a community of the world’s top researchers all pointed in the same direction, with the same intention, with the same mission.

We think this is one of the most important technical and moral challenges of our time. If you want to take it on with us, we’re hiring.