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Comment by warshinder | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are.

Edit: all that and spellcheck still sucks too.

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You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.

But the difference is AI made it easier for dumb radicals to discover this AND it will walk you through the infrastructure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...

If you believe that AI is powerful enough to help the good people (however you define that), why isn't that also coupled with the belief that it is powerful enough to help the bad people (ditto)? Either the capability of this tech is completely overblown or it can help a wide swath of people including those with conflicting ideologies.

I absolutely believe that AI can be used by bad people in harmful ways. I don't think that's going to take the form of mass murder. I don't think knowledge is the missing component there.

Well, you’ve convinced me. Ai changes nothing, so then we should be terrified of the capital being poured into and the opportunity costs lost to the current thing(tm).

AI changes lots of things, and many for the worse. The idea that it's going to enable terrorists to perform biological warfare isn't credible.

Sounds like you're reading into Amodei's propaganda as to why they should control AI. The information to make biological weapons for example is nothing new, it has been on the Internet for decades.

Should we control nuclear weapons? Is nuclear technology of the sort we’re fighting a war over right now a bigger technological advance than AI when it comes to war fighting capabilities? I suppose if you think ai is nothing big, it makes sense to not want to control it. Or, if you are all for widespread nuclear proliferation, then your position would make sense. ELSE: you’re totally illogical.

An LLM can't help you build a nuke. LLMs can't paper over hard engineering challenges like "You need to reinvent the centrifugal separator industry" and "rocket engineering is pretty difficult" and "you need really really good data to simulate things before you can actually build an implosion device" and less engineering challenges like "The CIA keeps murdering anyone who works on this"

There's never been an information access problem with nuclear weapons. The information was so public that most physicist realized everyone was building bombs from the sudden lack of published papers on how you could build bombs.

It's just silly how people seem to believe that if you just have a page worth of text saying something, you can suddenly do that thing.

Even a magical superintelligent AI could not do these things. It's going to tell you the exact same thing that has been known for nearly a century now:

"Hire 100 engineers and a couple physicists and 1000 very skilled machinists and laborers, and spend a billion dollars on plumbing, and then do that a second time if you need to deliver the device using a missile"

Meanwhile a dirty bomb is trivial.

These things don't happen because people who want to cause mass harm are generally poorly resourced.

Terrorists and evil people already use the internet for the same thing.

I’m not defending the internet!

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