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  • Hacker News
  • Ye domesday weapon will not be a disenchanted teenager whipping up COVID-19 variants (whatever that means) and spraying them on people.

    The real deal needs a lab messing around with viruses and whatever happened a few years ago ... and it did not destroy humanity.

    by gerdesj
  • "The problems with which the universe can confront any society are, for practical purposes, infinite in number and endless in variety." - Joseph Tainter

    AI will really aid the universe in generating more problems. Maybe it's not a supervirus, but hell, maybe it is.

    by 01284a7e
  • Oh my God THANK YOU.

    I do not have the words how tired I am of hearing tech people and economists talk about biology.

    by colingauvin
  • 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.)

    by Metacelsus
  • Everyone is gathering around patting themselves on the back, but smallpox depopulated an entire continent. Clearly it is possible for a highly transmittable deadly virus to exist.
    by Footnote7341
  • 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.
    by woopwoop
  • Native americans had like a 95% population mortality rate from infectious diseases in the first generation of European settlement, no? Measles, smallpox, flu, etc.

    The mortality rate from those diseases was higher than today because the population had no immunity at all, leading to both higher transmission rates and higher mortality rates. This would be true of an engineered virus as well.

    And it wasn't just the one virus, it was an entire continent's infectious disease arsenal landing in overlapping waves. Again, something you'd do if you were trying to maximize damage.

    So I don't find the bulk of the article about it being impossible for a virus to have this effect all that compelling.

    by jsnell
  • > 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 principles i.e. by thinking hard about it. (Sorry Plato, you can’t think your way to the moon.) You need increasingly precise measurements, which means increasingly complex tools which means…supply chains. Science requires supply chains. Magic doesn’t.

    by janalsncm

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