3 ms·
The biggest near-term threat is probably bioterrorism. You can get arbitrary DNA sequences synthesized and delivered by mail, right now, for about $1 per base p
by nyssos 3y ago
The biggest near-term threat is probably bioterrorism. You can get arbitrary DNA sequences synthesized and delivered by mail, right now, for about $1 per base pair. You'll be stopped if you try to order some known dangerous viral genome, but it's much harder to tell the difference between a novel synthetic virus that kills people and one with legitimate research applications.
This is already an uncomfortably risky situation, but fortunately virology experts seem to be mostly uninterested in killing people. Give everyone with an internet connection access to a GPT-N model that can teach a layman how to engineer a virus, and things get very dangerous very fast.
- Danjoe4 3y agoThe threat of bioterrorism is in no way enabled or increased by LLMs. There are hundreds of guides on how to make fully synthetic pathogens, freely available online, for the last 20 years. Information is not the constraint. The way we've always curbed manufacture of drugs, bombs, and bioweapons is by restricting access to the source materials. The "LLMs will help people make bioweapons" argument is a complete lie used as justification by the government and big corps for seizing control of the models. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12114528/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12114528/
- stavros 3y agoI haven't found any convincing arguments to any real risk, even if the LLM becomes as smart as people. We already have people, even evil people, and they do a lot of harm, but we cope. I think this hysteria is at best incidentally useful at helping governments and big players curtail and own AI, at worst incited hy them.