You're thinking like a law-abiding Westerner. The ethical risks are not a concern for all, if anything the humans are the cheap bit of the process. There are a few ways to improve a genetic algorithm exploration, one of them is to simply run a larger population at a time.

There have already been a few attempts by pharmaceutical companies to accelerate drug development by running clinical trials in poor countries with weaker patient protections. Regardless of the obvious ethical concerns, it turns out this doesn't actually speed up the process. It still takes just as long to discern a clear signal in terms of effects versus side effects. And those poor countries typically have infrastructure, security, and labor force problems which make it challenging to run large scale clinical trials at all.

If that is true, then even before AI pharmaceutical companies would have already moved all their research to places where their development would be much faster (but less ethical).

Pharmaceutical companies don't care about "ethical" research either, all they care about is making more money, faster.

> law-abiding Westerner

may I ask why did you specifically pinpoint to Westerner?

What's special about westerners when it comes to law?

Of of the things it does is make hidden research visible in a way that previous search engines or journals did not.