I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

#121

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

fergal_reid wrote: post #46

I am not a biology person, but, candidly, this is a bad article, because the author is generalizing from the properties of viruses that tend to arise naturally, and using this to argue about the properties of deliberately designed viruses. Firstly, it's not even clear that naturally occuring viruses can't be extremely lethal. There are examples (eg black death). Even the existence of rare examples should be concernin…

> Firstly, it's not even clear that naturally occurring viruses can't be extremely lethal. There are examples (eg black death).

The plague is not actually that easily transmitted. Basic social hygiene prevents it. It is still around and causes very nearly zero problem today.

Re: I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

#122

Post by fergal_reid » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #121

fergal_reid wrote: post #46

I am not a biology person, but, candidly, this is a bad article, because the author is generalizing from the properties of viruses that tend to arise naturally, and using this to argue about the properties of deliberately designed viruses. Firstly, it's not even clear that naturally occuring viruses can't be extremely lethal. There are examples (eg black death). Even the existence of rare examples should be concernin…

> Firstly, it's not even clear that naturally occurring viruses can't be extremely lethal. There are examples (eg black death). The plague is not actually that easily transmitted. Basic social hygiene prevents it. It is still around and causes very nearly zero problem today.

I think you are misunderstanding my point.

The technology to prevent plague was beyond the population at the time.

"Just use basic hygiene" is useless to a population who has no understanding of what that means.

It was a real virus that had very high mortality.

This makes it a serious counterpoint for people who argue such things can't be created in future.

"The AI designed killer virus using new science turned out to be not that easily transmitted, basic dynamically reprogrammable mrna implants easily prevents it, shame about the 95% who died"

Re: I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

#123

Post by woopwoop » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

alevskaya wrote: post #89

woopwoop wrote: post #50

The author seems to be arguing that it is biologically impossible or something to have a virus with the same transmission properties as COVID but higher virulence. I don't understand what principle he is invoking to make this claim.

Because fatality and virulence stand in fundamental tension with each other when it comes to epidemiology. You can't magic that tension away or just invent other incompatible properties of a hypothetical virus (stealth, latency, virulence, fatality, etc etc etc) just because you want to tell a ghost story. Biology: (immunology, cell biology, virology) impose constraints!

What do you think the word virulence means?

Re: I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

#124

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #27

> When people believe that AI could figure this out on its own, without first running extensive and expensive basic science experiments, they have left the realm of science and have entered what can only be described as religion. I strongly agree with this. Too many people have the Arthur C Clarke quote infecting their brains. So much of science is contingent on the physical world and cannot be determined from first…

[deleted]

Re: I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

#125

Post by crazygringo » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 3:27 PM UTC

mikestylz wrote: post #82

crazygringo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we really need for such a statement is concrete physical evidence that a virus is simply incapable of having such facilities. A major focus of the article is about the fundamental tradeoffs in how viruses operate. Was that not enough for you?

It is not, because we should not expect a manufactured technology to behave exactly as an evolved one. My understanding is there is not much incentive for a virus to kill off all its hosts. When they do it is largely an accident, and it is not uncommon for a severe virus to eventually get replaced by a less virulent and thus more successful strain. It's pretty hard to hill-climb evolution to such a point since the vi…

I'm not sure what the point of your comment is then, because there are unknown unknowns in literally everything.

The main point of the article has nothing to do with manufactured technology vs evolved technology. It is fundamentally about the tradeoffs involved in viruses spreading period. I think you either continue to misunderstand the article, or set such an epistemologically high bar for arguments that nothing can ever satisfy you -- which then has nothing whatsoever to do with this specific article.