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

#131

Post by customguy » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

mepiethree wrote: post #130

customguy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but is not able to make a cure due to logistical issues? It says no such thing: > they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world. It’s too late.

“It’s too late” is a logistical issue IMO. In this article, virus production is totally decentralized and fast, but vaccine production is centralized and slow. Why?

It still doesn't say anything about vaccine production being slow either:

> Overnight, with the help of frontier LLMs, they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world.

"overnight", that's way faster than the virus production! And I doubly don't see how "decentralizing" that would help, at all, what that has to do with anything.

It says why it's too late right in the next sentence:

> It’s too late. Because of the viruses’ long asymptomatic contagious periods, most people already have at least one of the viruses, so the vaccines don’t work.

You might say by the time production starts it's already too late. A vaccine isn't a cure. It could be distributed by teleportation into the bloodstream of anyone on Earth instantly, the instant it was discovered, and it would still be too late.

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

#132

Post by mikestylz » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 7:07 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #125

mikestylz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You seem like a smart person. I'm glad you're pushing back but cool the tone, and let's see if we can get to an agreement. There is not much evidence for these trade-offs put forward in the article, just on the order of five instances in nature which form a kind of curve if you squint. Should this be convincing? Well there are even definite outliers in history. Take smallpox on the native americans, or the bubonic plague. Ten years ago a mysterious virus wiped out 90% of the world's Bellinger River turtles. Why aren't these points in the article? Before the invention of the airplane there were many biologists saying such a thing was impossible, because they were extrapolating from the example of avian flight.

As for complete satisfaction with arguments, I'll admit you're right. I am often reasonably convinced but I don't know if I would ever give 100% confidence to anything. There can still be loads of zeros or nines after the decimal though. What's concerning here is that the article speaks in absolutes. I'm inclined to thinking in expected values. Even if we believed there were only a 1% chance such a virus could ever be designed by an AI, if the effect were to be a global plague of biblical proportion, we should still take that possibility extremely seriously. There's no humility shown in the writing, and that's the single most problematic part to me.

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

#133

Post by danaris » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

mrits wrote: post #53

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…

Is it so hard to think that super intelligence could piece things together that humans can’t?

"Superintelligence" is a vaguely-defined term that refers exclusively to things that do not currently exist, and we have no plausible path to, nor even a guarantee that it is even possible to create one.

So sure! This fictional thing can totally piece together things humans can't! It can count the atoms in a cloud, understand them all, predict their motions; it can develop faster-than-light travel and matter replication.

And it can do these things because it is fictional.