The design was never the hard part. You still have to make the thing.
Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.
Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.
But the next one (or the first one, if that one wasn’t manmade) will probably be much worse.
I feel like we are all somehow memoryhole-ing this massive trauma that nothing in this batshit era makes any sense without remembering.
Specifically, I wonder if the thirst for a machine god has anything to do with the activation of the Rapture narrative in the collective unconscious, which we then empower by forgetting its trigger. Call Joseph Campbell
It occupied this weird middle ground where it was bad enough to kill a pretty significant number of people, but not so bad that we're all shell-shocked survivors suppressing the trauma of burying loved ones. And nobody wants to characterize it like that. Half the people want to act like it was nothing, and the other half want to act like it was the worst catastrophe to afflict the world in modern times.
I did get pretty suck for a few weeks, recovered. My wife ended up with strange nerve damage that had her using a cane in her 40s for about six months, but she got back to normal. A friend got hit by Long Covid and plans out how to nap during the work day so he can make it to quitting time. But I don't know anybody who died from it. I am NOT saying nobody died from it, just that it wasn't so widespread that everybody had direct experience of death, like would be the case in something like a smallpox epidemic. The US saw over a million dead, which is a hell of a lot, but in a country of 350 million it's not "everybody comes out with massive trauma" a lot.
Plagues get a lot worse than that. Bodies weren't left to rot because nobody was left alive to bury them. Nobody straggled into the next town because it wiped out the entire population of their home town. A few years later, lots of people say with a straight face that it was no big deal. Nobody who went through the Black Death was saying it was no big deal a few years later.
I'm afraid Covid set us up for the next pandemic to be far worse than it has to be, because it was just mild enough that a substantial number of people are able to dismiss it. And that attitude is going to carry over the next time some novel virus starts spreading around the world. And that one might kill half the population instead of <1%.
Edit: and I want to emphasize that this is not a memory-hole thing. In December 2020, one third of Americans polled said that Covid was no more of a threat than the seasonal flu (https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...). A lot of other polls tell a similar story: right in the worst months of the pandemic, a large minority of Americans still thought it was no big deal. That's while it was going on, not in retrospect.
Thermo Fisher sells a kit to do this [1]. It's something you might do a few thousand times on the way to actually generating a novel virus.
> I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high
I'd argue that it probably already happened, and had nothing to do with AI.
[1] AAV transfection.
It was already done. Aparently some 3 letter agencies lack acountability.
You may be skipping a few of the involved steps.
You email the RNA strand (a text file) to a lab along with some money. The lab converts that information into a physical object (read: virus) and sends it back to you in the mail.
What step is missing?
Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist.
And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens?
Answers: No, no, and no.
Still, even though your estimates are silly, they aren't silly enough to change the conclusion that this isn't a comforting security barrier, so I suppose we agree on that much.
* there's not an obvious benefit to being the one nation that says "you know what? We want to be known as 'the nation whose biolab insecurity wrecked the world', because taking blame works out so well for everyone.", though I'm fairly sure a large portion of the world will be totally willing to wargame the impact of hosting a lab as a deadman switch so nobody else attacks them first…
They really just synthesize anything for you?
You: "No, of course not. I once went on a website to buy a drug, and they made go to a doctor and get a prescription and send it to them"
The black market exists -- but comes with black market problems.
Glad we agree that there are labs that will solve very hard parts of creating a novel virus, either by accident or by negligence.
Here's a red team exercise where researchers successfully bought fragments of the best known pathogen in the world, never mind a novel one.
What reasonable precautions failed to catch this but we could expect to catch a novel virus that "kinda looks like" a known virus?
https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/08/shouldnt-be-easy-buy-syn...
The shredding, mutating, reassembling is all it took to get the most well known pathogen in the world by the controls that you are suggesting are sufficiently tight
Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.
[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.
The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.
So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.
Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.
Synthetic biology is one of those things.
LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down.
Without LLMs, a reasonable security apparatus would be:
Step 1. Disallow dissemination and synthesis of known pathogens
Step 2. Watch closely anyone with the decades of training required to come up with their own pathogen
No.
No, the barriers I'm talking about aren't coming down. Not quickly anyway.
No, nobody assumed this was the "highest and last barrier". That's the point you keep missing.
LLMs are not "solving" the rate-limiting step here. It only looks that way if you don't know what's involved.
“No no some other step is hard. I won’t say what it is. No it’s not getting easier, miraculously, but I can’t say what it is.”
There you go!
Steps from your mailbox to an actual virus is a few days of bench work.
That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.
I'm just saying that people are focused on the wrong problem because they've got LLM-brain.
The people "got LLM-brain" are saying: "Wow those barriers are coming down fast"
And you're saying: "There are still barriers"
Both are true, but only one is helpful for thinking about the future. The other is hardly even helpful for thinking about the present, and I've never seen a quasi-intelligent person do it in lieu of some other motivations in their reasoning.
For each of the years below, what is YOUR estimate for how long would it take a person of 80th percentile intelligence with $10,000,000 (2026 money) to get from "I'd like to kill a lot of people" to a working virus?
You can provide a range for each if you'd like.
In the year 1800 – how long?
1950?
2020?
2026?
2050?
2200?