Oh my God THANK YOU.
I do not have the words how tired I am of hearing tech people and economists talk about biology.
I do not have the words how tired I am of hearing tech people and economists talk about biology.
I think he trots out a lot of straw-man arguments (e.g., teenager making the weapon, "super"virus, etc.).
Those scenarios are purposely far-fetched so that he can ridicule them and thereby leave the impression that all the AI/bioweapon concerns are similarly far-fetched.
He spends a lot of "tokens" discussing AI-generated viruses. But bioweapons can be much simpler than a virus--they can be small molecules that inactivate essential molecular targets in humans. This is something that was discussed at length when I was in grad school and it wasn't dismissed as hyperbolic hokum.
So, is AI going to develop a supervirus? Probably not. But it doesn't need to.
Instead, I speculate that AI can "help" in making bioweapons ...
a. more potent
b. less detectable
c. easier to disseminate
You still need humans in the lab to run the experiments, but I think it's foolish to dismiss the worries about AI in such a condescending way.
I was an experimental synbio person for decades, and I did plenty of microbial pathogen work. I've also worked on frontier LLMs for the last decade. All of this stuff is gated by experimental effort, not AI!
My post said you still needed to run the experiments, but if you think AI can't help to improve bioweapons compared to humans alone, I disagree.
But if Noah Smith wrote about a scenario where 90% of the population is killed by a virus created by some teenagers with an AI... it isn't a straw man to attack that scenario.
Yet anyone in tech with a Claude sub has decided that AI super-intelligence is impossible and it’s stupid to even worry about it.