AIs can do science, write code, impersonate people, and manipulate people. We’ve already got AlphaFold and ChatGPT and Copilot. People are moving full steam ahead with AI software developers and scientists who have access to deploy code and spend money and communicate with humans autonomously.
I don’t think it takes a whole lot of imagination to see these things improving and coming together in way that an AI agent could feasibly design and execute a plan to develop a bio weapon or deadly nanotech. His points are about how hard it is to prevent that with our current AI training regime.
His analogy, for example, between the human “inclusive fitness reward function” (we evolved with the role purpose of survival and reproduction) and RLHF-style human feedback for AI is apt, and not obvious. Just because we “evolved to survive” didn’t prevent groups of humans from developing the exact opposite capacity to make us extinct.