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- Hacker News
- if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible
and then what?
was the needle move at all?
by moomoo11 - Suppose it matters what order you do it in.
The best good thing possible for humans who are all suffering from an extremely painful, incurable disease might just be ending that misery.
The worst bad thing possible in a perfect utopia might be a minor inconvenience comparatively.
by besterman23 - > if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible
You say this like it's a truism, but I don't think it is. The bad things may be categorically easier than the good things. It's easier to destabilize a delicate system than to stabilize it. It's easier to break something than to fix it.
by notpachet - Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought.by einpoklum
- Well with each new thing we get the grifters, lesswrong is an AI grifter hangout.by Avicebron
- I guess you haven’t yet read Amodei’s essays? There is a significant overlap between the early SF AI scene and LessWrong contributors. That comes directly from the top, look at Anthropic leadershipby dgellow
- Yes, it’s also the way human society processes new stuff, be it novel technologies and the philosophical ramifications or other topics. Call it distributed Bayesian processing.
Sure each 2-cent philosophical posts isn’t worth much on its own but add up many of them over time and we get something more than its parts.
by elcritch - Hah, well, you must have never encountered LessWrong before. It has been like that for well over a decade, in fact it's probably approaching its second decade...
One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.
by A_D_E_P_T - Uninformed speculation from the rationalist cult forum that wants to will science fiction into reality.
If you actually look at the trajectory of post-LLM AI developments, the successes have all been in areas where the major labs have some way to get their hands on s**tons of correlated data. That's why they're pushing into maths now. I see no reason to assume that will be replicated with biological science data, which is extremely proprietary and not required to be exposed as part of the end product. It doesn't even have an equivalent to a black market in piracy like books or movies did. This data was not valuable to the public before now.
by jackb4040 - The successes are in areas where you can get AI to execute an iterative loop autonomously. Try, fail, refine, retry - succeed eventually.
Coding is, inherently, quite amenable to that. Is bioscience?
They're certainly working on making it so:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-resea...
by ACCount39 - Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count.
I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. All of these interact and define a design space that nature has been searching for at unimaginable scale for as long as humans have existed. And yet here we are! Seems like “wiping humanity” might be really hard, perhaps impossible for a virus.
Perhaps I’m being uncharitable or insufficiently creative, but these people strike me as deeply unserious in their engagement with the actually real physical world of biology.
EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?
by bglazer - An AI doesn't need to kill even nearly 100% of humanity in order to render us a non-threat.
Also there are plenty of doomer scenarios along the lines of e.g. some ethnosupremacist cult making a virus that kills everyone outside of their group.
by aqme28 - Same idiots think folks are at risk from firearms printed from a desktop PLA 3d printerby dmboyd
- The obvious argument is that natural organisms are restricted in ways that artificial ones are not (e.g. natural viruses are not selected to kill their host too quickly, natural selection can only reach solutions which can be reached incrementally).
>EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?
This does not follow automatically. E.g. it is enormously easier to create an ICBM than to create something capable of intercepting an ICBM. Some technologies naturally benefit an attacker and some naturally benefit a defender.
by sebzim4500 - yes - I don't want to publicize what I know. I worked briefly at a leading university bio lab. It's haunted me for awhile that it would only take 1 disgruntled postdoc to wipe out humanity. There are {AI things} now that will tell you how.by reedf1
- But a virus's "goal" would not be to wipe out a species, that would be a dead end. Nature has explored flight on an unimaginable scale, yet our machines fly better (at least in most aspects) than birds, some even go to space.by pingou
- The positive impact on human aging/lifespan/healthspan is not being talked about enough when it comes to AI+biosciences.by KasianFranks
- Cutting sugars, not smoking, regular checkups, watching your weight, managing stress, and getting enough exercise and sleep still trumps any other therapeutic-based life extension approach. But I know, I know, it's actual effort, and technology is about making things easier so it's a non-starter.
But I do agree that if we're on the verge* of von Neumann replicators and getting replaced by Pokhumans** to cheer on the ASI, then curing cancer, immortality and cryo-suspension are likely trivial achievements in comparison.
*Nope, not even close, but don't tell that to the ASI cultists, that's like questioning the veracity of the gospels now.
**Yes, that's the strong claim in AI 2027. And the democratic party apparently believes it.
by LogicFailsMe - The issue is, you kind of have to not get wrecked by the negative impacts to collect those positive impacts.
Unfortunately, "AI that's competent at bioweapon R&D" might be an easier mark to hit than "AI that can put a dent in the aging process". And biorisks can have a very favorable "resource input -> suffering output" rate of returns.
by ACCount39 - Have we already seen that impact? Or is it speculative? Because the speculative part is discussed all the timeby dgellow
- You can use AI to brute-force different crystal configurations, run some MD/DFT and identify candidates. I'd be (not completely, but) shocked if there wasn't a research group doing this already. To rapidly iterate with physical samples is still beyond our capabilities AFAIK.by alansaber
- Is the term "One-shotting" here even appropriate? In the context of AI one-shotting means giving your llm a single prompt and having it return a surprisingly good result (usually code related) without requiring further input, but the llm (probably) still iterates heavily before showing the results. When Codex "one-shots" something it depends a ton on the fact that code is easily testable.by Semkas
- Lately "one-shotting" means "without human steering / feedback"
I think its a consequence of the improvements in harnesses and LLMs of the last year. Before they had a hard time self-reviewing the results and proceeding to a second iteration, now they are quite good at it although not perfect.
by belluxx - I remember being told that coming up with the alloy for the oxygen side pre-burner in Spacex's Raptor engine was a tedious trial and error grind over many days and nights and not a euphoric 'a ha!' moment. I wonder if AI could help with these kinds of problems, if it can be simulated in software then let AI do the grinding.
/the oxygen side pre-burner in a full flow staged combustion rocket engine is a nasty place and figuring out a material that will survive in that environment was the key (or one of the keys) to making Raptor a reality.
by chasd00 - The post focuses on AI social engineering a lab to make something for it, but I think that's the wrong concern. I think the bigger concern with AI is that an individual, or small group of individuals, uses AI as a really useful assistant to learn how to develop deadly viruses on a DIY level.
I'm pretty bearish on the idea of AI becoming Skynet from Terminator 2, but I do think there's some credibility to the bioterrorism argument. When I used to talk with people that work in orgs tasked with preventing terrorism, this was the thing that was keeping them up at night, and this was before AI.
by kyledrake - You don't need an AI to tell you where to buy castor beans or their seeds.by LogicFailsMe