101–110 of 122 posts
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Do you need to be a physicist to realize an asteroid is going to kill you ?
Arguably yes. I would wager no one killed by an asteroid in the history of people killed by asteroids realized what was happening before they died.
Yet anyone in tech with a Claude sub has decided that AI super-intelligence is impossible and it’s stupid to even worry about it.
I agree an AI isnt going to create one. but the number of raving loons out there that think 5G chips are in vaccines are going to go absolutely stark raving mad the next time there is a pandemic.
then they'll be super susceptible to AI generated political adverts from the next fuckwit political hack trying to get into power.
looking at how the world is panning out atm moment... I expect AI to have a massive influence on the sort of idiots that will get voted into power and make decisions that will get a vast number of us killed. by all sorts of means... war, famine, unregulated corporate poisoning...
AI is going to get us killed, because we'll use it to kill ourselves.
> 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…
Especially when it comes to biological things. Just look at Novartis this week - three failed clinical trials of promising drugs ( https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/novartis-faces-... ) These are some of the brightest minds on the planet, spending oodles of money on things they think they understand. And they didn't work.
Just because the author can't think of a way to cause mass death with an engineered virus, doesn't mean an AI won't be able to think of one. (There are several biological threats the author hasn't considered. I'll just leave it at that.)
I know what you’re thinking. A modified HIV virus that also makes everyone hot and horny.
That sounds like a good video game to spin up in Astra. Missile command was pretty cool. We didn’t destroy mankind with that one either.
Or you could just play the original Pandemic https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/360724 I think that's one detail that this analysis glosses over is that you design the virus to mutate and develop lethality. So initially, it's just like, oh, another common cold, but then once it's infected a large number of people, then it mutates and starts being lethal.
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Viruses probably too hard but I think small scale bioterrorism is much easier and doesn't require fancy enzymes. I think this is actually the best argument for regulation of current models. It's even happened pre-AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
Well we're talking about new types of capabilities here, Sarin is a chemical which can be manufactured with a basic understanding of chemistry and searching with google.com. AI will not allow bad actors to do anything they couldn't have done already with google's 10 blue links. Again the same logic applies though, it takes significant effort and money to create sarin, it requires a lot of rigor. That is the limiting…
I'm far from anything resembling an expert in biological weapons, but this seems to me puzzlingly overconfident in the opposite direction. > PhD students in 2026 using state-of-the-art AI software are spending months or years trying to design simple peptide binders that inhibit some enzyme or pull down some protein This confuses me, as state-of-the-art AI software is moving quite quickly. Any software that is current…
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Especially when it comes to biological things. Just look at Novartis this week - three failed clinical trials of promising drugs ( https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/novartis-faces-... ) These are some of the brightest minds on the planet, spending oodles of money on things they think they understand. And they didn't work.
It's much easier to create a poison than a medicine. The things that would harm biological life vastly outnumber things that restore health. So just because Novartis didn't succeed at creating an incredibly precise and specific medication does not mean all the AI in the world can't make a crude bio-agent.
Now here’s a real risk involving measles that I sometimes worry about. What if the measles virus experienced a set of immune escape mutations where suddenly existing vaccines no longer work? If this happened the consequences would be horrifying. We’d have an immediate, world-wide measles epidemic long before we could develop and roll out a new vaccine. What’s the likelihood this will happen? Informed estimates are th…