Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

There are many articles written on such a topic. In short, we have no way of predicting how an AGI will think, and there are more pathways to it being our enemy (intentionally or not) than to it being our ally. Especially since we can't even conceive of what it would look like for an entity to be the ally of all of humanity - humanity itself is not united on any goal at all.

Pick one goal. Any goal that does or could affect humanity on a global scale. Now try to work out a plan to achieve that goal. Does your plan have the potential to anger a military power? If yes, you're a threat to humanity if you try to enact that goal.

Even beyond the reasoning that AGI is likely to be dangerous, imagine it's a just 50/50 chance. Or even a 10% chance. Even a 5% chance. How low does the chance of human extinction need to go before you're willing to press The Button?

Most of the arguments I see here amount to either "There is literally no risk of superhuman AI threatening human extinction," which is unequivocally wrong, or "There is literally no possibility of AGI existing," which is also unequivocally wrong.

People usually say, "well it's at least decades away," which is actually them in denial that AGI can exist and be an existential threat. Because if they really believed it could happen in a few decades it would still be worth working on. Imagine someone told you "In 40 years a superhuman AGI will awaken and flip a coin to decide whether or not it destroys humanity," how long would you wait to start working on defense?

> Premise 3 is where the problem is, of course.

I don't believe premise 3 is a problem exactly, but I do believe that it is a non-trivial challenge to determine whether or not it is true.

> We have no idea how to build AGI. We know LLMs won't be it.

> Even if we create AGI, we have no indication it is possible to build a orders-of-magnitude more "intelligent" thing. This is predicated entirely on the notion that if you can do it at scale, you get more, and there's no evidence thinking more makes for more intelligence.

> Even if that were possible and we build an ASI, it's not at all clear this would lead to existential catastrophe. An ASI is presumably smart enough to see it's about to end the world as we know it, and knows where its power supply comes from.

> This leaves us with an xrisk probability so close to zero it's virtually indistinguishable from zero. The only way to make it mean anything is "let's multiply it with infinity" - "it will end humanity, and my own survival is endangered".

It looks to me that you are making the following argument:

  Premise G1. Humans do not currently know how to build AGI.
  Premise G2. It might be impossible to build ASI.
  Premise G3. It is unclear how likely an ASI is to cause an existential catastrophe.
  Conclusion. There is not a significant chance of catastrophe from ASI.

I apologize if I have misunderstood your point.

> Alignment is a tool that works with LLMs, but we don't know if it will work for whatever produces AGI.

We may be using the word "alignment" slightly differently. By "alignment" I just meant getting the algorithmic system to have precisely the goal that its human programmers want it to have. I would call, for example, RLHF a "tool" for trying to achieve alignment.

How do you want to use the terms "alignment" and "alignment tool" going forward in the discussion?

> Meanwhile, ordinary humans can use currently existing tools to end the world just fine. Nukes are readily available. We're obviously not really interested in public health. Climate refugees will be a giant problem soon-ish. The economy is very much a house of cards, but a house of cards that keeps society functioning as-is.

I agree that there are other plausible sources of catastrophe for humans, to name a few others: asteroids, supervolcanoes and population collapse.

I understand you to be making a new point now, but I just want to state that I do not believe the existence of other plausible existential threats to be a rebuttal of premise 3.

> LLMs are a fantastic disinfo tool right now. There's a reasonably good chance they will calcify biases. They will cause large economic damage because 1) they lift up the baseline of work, and 2) they're just good enough that there's economic incentive to replace workers with it, but 3) they're shitty enough that the resulting output will ultimately be worse because we removed humans from the loop.

I agree that LLMs may plausibly cause significant harm in the short term via disinformation and unemployment.

And again, I understand you to be making a new point, but I just want to state that I do not believe the plausibility of such LLM harms is a rebuttal against premise 3.

> Those are actual risks. That we sweep under the carpet, because "xrisk" makes for much more grabby headlines.

I'm not sure who you mean by "we" here, so I'm not sure if your claim about them is true or not.

Still, it's worth keeping the barrier of entry higher than just being able to order it.

As per the homomorphic encryption discussed earlier, you can easily avoid the 'need' for this by having federal governments operate the screening tools.

Exactly! Keeping groups with lots of resources from synthesizing harmful things isn't a battle we can win (and in a decade or so biological design tools will make scanning synthesis orders a very weak precaution) but raising the bar means fewer people are in a position to cause large-scale damage.

(Long term we also need to make society more robust to biological attacks, with better monitoring, better PPE, and faster countermeasures.)