Comment by Barrin92
1 day ago
terrorists can also use annas archive, scihub and equipment they order on Alibaba to build bioweapons and I don't see him losing his mind over those
if you're trying to build a bioweapon shockingly enough the bottleneck is... the laboratory work. What on earth is 'legit' about stringing words together that sound scary, you can't just iterate 'ai bioweapon cyber' in a sentence over and over as if that adds up to actual evidence for an increased risk of any threat. well tbf you can technically because apparently it freaks a lot of podcast listeners out
As a thought experiment imagine you have a biochemical PhD expert on the phone with you giving you step by step instructions on how to grow some dangerous biotoxin, giving you feedback in real time and helping you troubleshoot. Would you be more successful with this expert than you'd be on your own?
Now imagine anyone can call that expert for free at any time.
Maybe the AI isn't quite there with biology knowledge yet (doubtful), but it is a matter of time.
How is that not a real risk?
> As a thought experiment imagine you have a biochemical PhD expert on the phone with you giving you step by step instructions on how to grow some dangerous biotoxin, giving you feedback in real time and helping you troubleshoot. Would you be more successful with this expert than you'd be on your own?
I think there is some difference of degree, but not of kind. A determined terrorist can relatively easily find many ways to kill people en masse today, no AI needed. The bottleneck is usually the actual physical execution in the real world, not theoretical knowledge.
>The bottleneck is usually the actual physical execution in the real world, not theoretical knowledge.
And the interest or willpower too. People fall into a kind of reductive Good vs Evil mode of thinking, with "terrorists" being of course a kind of shadowy mass of pure evil lurking in the darkness. But actual real life terrorists are people too and I'd wager few of them are actually interested in trying to end humanity.
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The issue with the direction of technology is it tends to make things that were once very hard to impossible. This is why there are bumper stickers mocking Libertarians by saying things like "legalize recreational plutonium".
If we are not careful and suddenly release tools with far more capabilities than we expect you go from "smart" people being able to do it, to some angsty teenager being able to pull it off in their bedroom.
The current issue with AI is we are squirting out new models faster than we can complete long term testing on them. We'll find new model capabilities long after they've been in the field. Just assuming safety is how you catch cancer from your food dye, or how you change the atmosphere around you and start burning down your planet. Now just imagine that involving intelligence and doing with a few percent of the worlds GDP to make it happen.
not an expert but because i assume you need the physical resources to do it in the first place?
you don't even need to make it a thought experiment, we have real world cases of this. Anthrax cultivation is easy enough that a first year biology student can do it, but it's in practice so dangerous and difficult to aerosolize without the correct equipment that nobody does it. The information to easily produce many bioweapons is online, the internet and instant global communication already democratized knowledge, why are terrorists still driving trucks into crowds?
Plans for 3d printed weapons are publicly available, same argument was made then, if everyone can download a blueprint for a gun, are we all going to get gunned down? Hasn't happened. There's two errors in this Bill Gates argument. One is thinking terrorists don't already have PhDs, secondly overrating intelligence because that's the only thing they're good at, and when they think of terrorists they just think of their own inflated egos, but turned evil. Which isn't how real terrorists operate
Synthesizing complex information from a range of textbooks enough to build bioweapons is cognitively impenetrable for the vast majority of people. Having the AI synthesize this information into a step-by-step recipe to follow is within the capabilities of most motivated individuals.