Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Don’t we already have plenty of deadly viruses around? Why would you design a virus when rabies, anthrax and Ebola, for starters, exist in the wild?by rich_sasha
- Naturally evolved viruses tend to have a tradeoff between contagiousness and lethality (just because both features have to evolve somewhat simultaneously). Synthetic viruses have no such difficulty.by estearum
- This happened a full year ago. A) you should immediately discount the expertise of people just learning this now B) a designed pathogen will kill a person this century, full stop, no way to prevent that. The people who invented fission were not so stupid they imagined the bomb wouldn't occur, indeed they assumed it would. I have no idea what became of the wisdom of those people. C) just like nuclear technology that doesn't mean a prohibition is called for. Intelligence is.
What we _can_ do is invest in detection, rapid response technology (vaccines etc), and attempt to mitigate and stratify the possibilities of this happening in the worse ways.
Today's knee jerk prohibitions, and fanciful notions of prohibition working are not facilitating those changes.
by alpineidyll3 - Yes, we should, but even here distribution is an serious issue.by mehraban
- Doubly because they’ll also use AI to manage the AI pandemic response.by ModernMech
- Something 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 free market) encourage reckless aggressiveness at the level of companies and countries.
Although, I must admit, as a doomer, I'm pleasantly surprised things aren't already worse than they are.
by acjohnson55 - Every person's utopia is someone else's dystopia and vice versa. What you've described is clearly some peoples (ie. already billionaires) version of the best possible world. Not so much for the rest of us though...
- I think you would get a kick out of reading this paper on this exact topic, called the Vulnerable World Hypothesis https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
However I think the result is disappointing, it concludes the only solution is a massive preventative surveillance state and global governance.
- I’d say that is almost the definition of technology: that which allows doing ever more with fewer and fewer people and resources.
And technology doesn’t really care what you use it for. It can be constructive or destructive.
It “only” enhanced local destructive potential, until last century. Then it got to the point where a huge effort could produce a truly global catastrophe. And then a bit smaller effort. And technology continues to march on.
by wat10000 - > proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people
did you mean greater number of people with less resources?
EDIT: thanks to others that point out how you can interpret this differently, which I think is: "it is now easier for smaller teams with fewer resources" rather than my original interpretation of "power is now concentrated so that fewer people can do this than before"
by andsoitis - 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.
- This is what AI safety activist Connor Leahy calls offense-defense asymmetry. Imagine if a nuke could be created with household materials. We got lucky that wasn't the case, but we didn't know that it wasn't the case before studying physics. If we weren't so lucky that physics happened to turn out that way, we already wouldn't exist, because the offense would be so much stronger than defense, we wouldn't stand a chance even with the best surveillance systems.
A profitable prediction markets trader who goes by the alias semiotic rivalry posted this prediction on his X account recently:
> Prediction: in 1-2 years, almost everyone will agree that open sourcing the best AIs is totally crazy as the AIs become capable of autonomous hacking of most humans and institutions, serious terrorism and creation of biological weapons, etc.
And I mostly agree with him. As much as it's awful to have such a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few governments or corporations, as far as I can tell there are no easy answers here, only a matter of trade offs and different risks.
by energy123 - It is complicated, because the real question is about who gets to design the virusses, and who gets to design the antidotes.by PeterStuer
- Get ready for the next adventure in the saga of 12 Monkeys, with AI starts like Bruce Wills, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer, coming to a bio lab around you. The experience of a life time one you can't miss, it is in the air.by evilelectron
- Related:
AI Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200213
Artificial Intelligence used to design new viruses
- 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.
- I don’t think it will be easy. Making a virus involves far more than reading some instructions.by LPisGood
- The regulation at the DNA Printer level works I think, as long as nobody invents a good at home DNA printer, but if they do that there is no need for custom viruses, somebody can take an existing one that is known to be deadly and just print it.by hoppp
- That's a brilliant invention!
I will kickstart a home DNA printer
I will name it Torment Nexus
I will be rich
by 1attice - That’s what I’m thinking. If we can restrict EUV technology to the West then why can’t we restrict DNA manufacturing? Not to the West in this case but to capable governments like with Nuclear power.
- A custom designed virus is potentially far more deadly than something like ebola, because animals/plants will have zero resistance to it.
It'd be like releasing an invasive species into an ecosystem that has not co-evolved to co-exist with it.
- Aren't technological constraints such as these short lived? Even if s home DNA printer won't be available this decade, the technology will come at some point. It's far better to have both legal and social policy in place before then - though the legal policy will probably not matter at all.by dotancohen
- The 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.
by timr - You can literally send an email to one of hundreds of companies that do exactly this. They have no way of knowing whether you're asking them to synthesize a virus or a drug candidate or what.by estearum
- 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 highby haxiomic
- AI 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.
by dataviz1000 - I'm a wildly pro-AI dude, but the idea that this is an existential threat makes me think one thing: "you consume too much dystopian content."
A lot of things could be an existential threat, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, climate change, the end of the Flynn effect, cratering birth rates, whatever.
You can always pick out a particularly dystopian vision of the future if you're so inclined. The doom narrative is sells ad revenue, so it's a huge amount of what we all consume online, but it's not really that mapped out to reality...
Somethings get worse, some things get better, in general, the average QoL for the average human is getting better. If we decide not to go to global thermonuclear war, or we decide to unplug any killer AIs that we invent, we'll probably be ok. If we can reduce the population to 3,000-ish humans after the Toba eruption, we can probably survive whatever self-imposed calamities we can create.
I think there's something particularly noxious about the present nihilism trend I see in a lot of this doom themed content. People should go outside and touch grass.
by piloto_ciego - I think of it as a silicone-based alien lifeform.by akomtu
- The sun is an existential threat. It will envelop earth in a few billion years, are you going to shut it off too?by alpineidyll3