Comment by Marha01
15 hours ago
> 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.
The only terrorists who wanted to end the world were Aum Shinrikyo as far as I remember. Everyone else is fighting for a cause that benefits their people - some good like kicking out colonial oppression, some evil like fascism or Islamism, some of them in between like various ethnic conflicts.
Even the religious extremists don't really want to take over the world and destroy everyone who doesn't convert. That's just a way to gain support from a conservative nation. A lot of them are motivated by revenge for wars that destroyed their country and want to make sure it never happens again.
Their methods are wrong no doubt, and not very effective, but the reasons they do it are good. And a person like that will never release a deadly bio weapon. We should worry more about incel mass shooter types who believe everyone is evil.
Exactly. I am more worried about a Beavis-and-Butthead lone wolf incel type making something that kills a thousand people and then scale that up across 4chan or whatever. Not human extinction but still very bad.
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.