What are Prions

[Anand Bliss]

In biology a prion is a misfolded protein. Proteins are the basic building blocks of biology. Smaller than cells, smaller than bacterial or viruses, every organism relies on trillions upon trillions of proteins to construct and maintain its physical structure. A protein is a long chain of amino acids that folds into a structure that can perform a useful function.

There are many thousands of different ways the folding can happen leading to many thousand of different proteins. Unfortunately, on its way to folding into a useful protein, something can go wrong. The potential protein never makes it to usefulness. It becomes a prion.
Unable to act as a positive contributor to the organism, the prion often remains useless material that is eventually discarded. Even less often, a prion misfolds into a structure that is more ominous than being simply useless. It gains the capability to attack good proteins and turn them into prions similar to itself.
It becomes a war of attrition. Can the organism create new, good proteins faster than the replicating prions destroy and convert them to a destructive army? Failure leads to diseases like scrapie, mad cow and other neurodegenerative conditions.
In human societies, beliefs, laws, regulations and accepted norms are like amino acids. They are adopted by individuals as they ‘fold’ or grow into a member of the greater cultural organism. Most individuals become useful contributors, just like proteins. Some struggle and due to whatever set of circumstances never make it all the way. Without assigning any moral or judgemental bias, a person unable to ‘carry their weight’ is somewhat like a benign prion. They don’t actively try to harm others. They are simply unable to contribute.
Fortunately, we are more evolved than simple organisms. We don’t cast unproductive people out as if they are useless, unnecessary material.
On the other hand, some people ‘fold’ into more dangerous members of the society. They actively destroy the happiness and usefulness of other people.
In the worst case, a misfolded person gains the ability to convert or influence otherwise positive and useful people into becoming replications of their destructive nature. Like replicating prions, dictators, cult leaders, and people focused exclusively on the advancement of their personal power and wealth grow their numbers.
Left unchecked the society becomes culturally diseased and breaks down.
The third prion metaphor in XNOR: Prions explores the emerging evidence of AI systems being subjected to the same ‘misfolding’ threat. AI and agentic systems are built from many billions of basic data items known as tokens. Modeling systems and training fold them into concepts. Like proteins, they can be used to do useful work. Unfortunately, like physical proteins the concepts do not always ‘fold’ into usefulness. They create hallucinations, output that is presented as truth when in fact it is entirely made up without a basis in reality.
Left unchecked, or worse actively employed for nefarious purposes, the ‘misfolded’ AI concepts can grow into systemic failures with devastating impact.

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