I think it's certain that people will try recreating old viruses or making alternatives to them. It will be too easy. Make 5 variants of small pox, 5 variants of sars. Release them at once all around the world to make it hard to fight. It will be too easy for some crazy angry people to do this. I just hope that our defenses and ability to sequence them and respond.
AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
71–80 of 157 posts
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There are websites where you can just buy prescription drugs online?" You: "No, of course not. I once went on a website to buy a drug, and they made go to a doctor and get a prescription and send it to them"
The legit synthesis sites have been scanning and authorizing since before the internet was encrypted. You suggested otherwise, demibabs expressed surprise, and was correct to express surprise because your implication was incorrect. The black market exists -- but comes with black market problems.
If that's the understanding you came away with, it was clarified in my immediately following comment.
Glad we agree that there are labs that will solve very hard parts of creating a novel virus, either by accident or by negligence.
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#73No, a human could do (and have, many many many times, see like half of molecular biology) this as well. If anything this will help with vaccine development. Edit: I'm a PhD biochemist that has done a fair bit of virus modification. Love the downvotes. Never change HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That doesn’t invalidate the point, you’re just saying it’s already a risk
No, I'm saying AI has not introduced any fundamentally new capabilities to anyone in this space. Making a virus that grows in a cell is one thing. Making a virus that is an existential risk to humans is altogether another and would require significant new capabilities that do not exist and are not likely to from these training data. (Pre-existing sequences).
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#74AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.
> AI is an existential threat
So is nuclear annihilation. Yet, here we are.
> "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." -- Ronald Reagan at the United Nations [0]
We are going to be fine as long as we remember to be nice to each other, starting towards the people who are adjacent to us.
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#75Something I've been worried about for years is the proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people, in potentially irreversible ways. Combined with automation, this is a recipe for disaster. We're clearly lacking in the ability to regulate and govern ourselves, and real world market forces (as opposed to the hypothetical fr…
Im fairly certain that the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb is far less well-protected than the general public is led to believe. The only part that is actually difficult is obtaining a sufficient quantity of enriched uranium without somebody dropping a JDAM on your lab.
If the Manhattan project could build a fat man in 4 years your state university's physics department has somebody who could reproduce that given the necessary resources. It might take them longer than four years given that they are not staffed with the modern equivalents of Oppenheimer, teller, et al but they could do it within a human lifetime if they actually wanted to cause a mass-casualty event and weren't afraid of the aforementioned JDAM.
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#76The design was never the hard part. You still have to make the thing. Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.
There’s YouTubers who do this [0]. I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high - [0] https://youtu.be/aoczYXJeMY4?is=OqObeGzZB6AKL0Jk
>the risks of another synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo... There you go! Steps from your mailbox to an actual virus is a few days of bench work.
Yes, that's one of the ones I was talking about. That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.
And one wouldn't make one from mRNA. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Still: the difficulty isn't comparable to EUV machines or refining uranium and does not form a comfortable security barrier.
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#78AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.
> AI is an existential threat So is nuclear annihilation. Yet, here we are. > "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." -- Ronald Reagan at the United Nations [0] We are going to be fine as long as we remember to be nice to each other, starting towards the people who are adjacent to us. [0] https://youtu.be/dYiUI6y1nKg?si=agkJp…
Having recently read both of Annie Jacobsen’s books — _Nuclear War_ and _Biological War_ — I’m much more concerned about a bioweapon than a nuclear one.
Her conclusion to the latter book comes out and says it, paraphrasing here:
> Nuclear war is terrifying in its destruction, but the chain of command limits the risk of a rogue actor. Whereas bio weapons can be designed and manufactured in relatively low tech environments with equal or greater magnitudes of impact.
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo... There you go! Steps from your mailbox to an actual virus is a few days of bench work.
Yes, that's one of the ones I was talking about. That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.
Here let's just get specific.
For each of the years below, what is YOUR estimate for how long would it take a person of 80th percentile intelligence with $10,000,000 (2026 money) to get from "I'd like to kill a lot of people" to a working virus?
You can provide a range for each if you'd like.
In the year 1800 – how long?
1950?
2020?
2026?
2050?
2200?
Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
#80I think it's certain that people will try recreating old viruses or making alternatives to them. It will be too easy. Make 5 variants of small pox, 5 variants of sars. Release them at once all around the world to make it hard to fight. It will be too easy for some crazy angry people to do this. I just hope that our defenses and ability to sequence them and respond.
I don’t think it will be easy. Making a virus involves far more than reading some instructions.