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I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

• infinite_spin 17d ago
  https://archive.is/kH6U5 https://archive.is/kH6U5
  • mepiethree 17d ago
    So somehow AI is able to magically create 100 lethal viruses with no logistical issues but is not able to make a cure due to logistical issues?
    • anigbrowl 17d ago
      My immediate reaction to his The doomsday virus has a first-mover advantage over the vaccine. The time that people start to drop dead from the virus is the time you start to make and distribute a vaccine. Even if AI can design and synthesize a vaccine within hours, how fast can it be rolled out to the general populace? It took months to distribute the Covid vaccines, even when we already knew how to make them. You have to physically load the doses on trucks[...] was just 'make a viral vaccine with a shorter incubation period and infect everyone'. Handwavey problems require handwavey solutions.
    • customguy 17d ago
      > but is not able to make a cure due to logistical issues? It says no such thing: > they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world. It’s too late.
      • mepiethree 16d ago
        “It’s too late” is a logistical issue IMO. In this article, virus production is totally decentralized and fast, but vaccine production is centralized and slow. Why?
        • customguy 15d ago
          It still doesn't say anything about vaccine production being slow either: > Overnight, with the help of frontier LLMs, they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world. "overnight", that's way faster than the virus production! And I doubly don't see how "decentralizing" that would help, at all, what that has to do with anything. It says why it's too late right in the next sentence: > It’s too late. Because of the viruses’ long asymptomatic contagious periods, most people already have at least one of the viruses, so the vaccines don’t work. You might say by the time production starts it's already too late. A vaccine isn't a cure. It could be distributed by teleportation into the bloodstream of anyone on Earth instantly, the instant it was discovered, and it would still be too late.
          • mepiethree 13d ago
            My mistake on vaccine vs. cure. so have AI make a cure instead
  • mepiethree 17d ago
    The author scoffing at the climate scientist is so cringe
• Metacelsus 17d ago
  Just because the author can't think of a way to cause mass death with an engineered virus, doesn't mean an AI won't be able to think of one. (There are several biological threats the author hasn't considered. I'll just leave it at that.)
  • phoghed 17d ago
    I know what you’re thinking. A modified HIV virus that also makes everyone hot and horny.
    • skeledrew 16d ago
      A surge in rape cases and just curiosity into this new heightened-sex fad will lead to discovery pretty quickly.
  • jeremyjh 17d ago
    The author can't think of what a superintelligence will do, because they are not a superintelligence. But that is not really what people are concerned about, so I think the objections here are quite meaningful. If there is a fully general superintelligence - in the current state of alignment - we will all die for some reason. It doesn't really matter what the reason is.
    • deleted 17d ago
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    • cobbzilla 17d ago
      please define fully general superintelligence & current state of alignment is this a tautology?
      • andai 16d ago
        Not the guy but, alignment seems to be several decades away, while self-improvement seems to be several years away. (Also you don't even need superintelligence to do a lot of damage. In fact you don't need any intelligence!)
• ViktorRay 17d ago
  I wonder if there is a name to this phenomena. Where being knowledgeable in one thing (such as computer science) means you incorrectly believe you are an expert in another domain (such as virology)
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  • throwawayy6767 17d ago
    Noah Smith isn't an expert in computer science either, he's just some online guy who posts a lot about his opinions. He used to have semi-decent takes but at some point in the past few years he went completely off the rails.
    • ViktorRay 17d ago
      Maybe my original comment wasn’t clear. If so I apologize. I was actually criticizing Noah Smith. I agree with what the author of the posted article said. EDIT: actually it isn’t even that. I personally don’t know enough about this topic to really have an opinion or criticize anyone. Still it’s indeed a phenomena I’ve noticed.
  • ghurtado 17d ago
    It's much simpler than that: You don't have to be an expert on anything to be a complete dunce in everything else. Hardly rare enough to call it a "phenomenon"
• tayo42 17d ago
  My sci fi story I came up with was,not that a virus is good to kill us,but a rogue AI is going to use a virus or something to hijack our minds and have us do the physical work it wants done like an ant colony.
  • nprateem 17d ago
    Maybe it'll call this superpower "money"
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• dvduval 17d ago
  That sounds like a good video game to spin up in Astra. Missile command was pretty cool. We didn’t destroy mankind with that one either.
  • Mathnerd314 17d ago
    Or you could just play the original Pandemic https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/360724 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/360724 I think that's one detail that this analysis glosses over is that you design the virus to mutate and develop lethality. So initially, it's just like, oh, another common cold, but then once it's infected a large number of people, then it mutates and starts being lethal.
    • jkahrs595 16d ago
      Madagascar will be safe
    • skeledrew 16d ago
      By definition mutation is a random phenomenon, so there's no telling what could happen. But the most likely outcome is the virus loses all efficacy, just as we have a lot of mutations happening within us but they usually amount to nothing (otherwise we would've had a few generations of "X-Men" already).
• intrasight 17d ago
  AI is just one of many things that concerns me. But it has lately risen higher on the worry chart.
• gerdesj 17d ago
  Ye domesday weapon will not be a disenchanted teenager whipping up COVID-19 variants (whatever that means) and spraying them on people. The real deal needs a lab messing around with viruses and whatever happened a few years ago ... and it did not destroy humanity.
  • Scramblejams 16d ago
    > The real deal needs a lab messing around with viruses and whatever happened a few years ago ... and it did not destroy humanity. That observation maybe holds if the lab from a few years ago correctly selected the virus for the greatest overall lethality (why not MERS or Ebola or something else?) and made its best effort to turn it into a bioweapon. I don't know about you, but I don't think that's quite what happened...
    • gerdesj 15d ago
      Testing ... testing 1-2-3
      • Scramblejams 14d ago
        I guess when they get their vaccine game down we’ll really have to worry!
        • gerdesj 14d ago
          I don't normally wear a tin foil hat but you never know!
• 01284a7e 17d ago
  "The problems with which the universe can confront any society are, for practical purposes, infinite in number and endless in variety." - Joseph Tainter AI will really aid the universe in generating more problems. Maybe it's not a supervirus, but hell, maybe it is.
  • ghurtado 17d ago
    That quote is very interesting, because I think I interpreted it the opposite of you: "we could be attacked by an infinity of problems, which means that worrying about all of them is statistically unpractical"
    • 01284a7e 16d ago
      I interpret it similarly, I think - in that you can't totally predict what's going to be the thing that really bites you in the ass.
• Dig1t 17d ago
  Thank goodness someone wrote this, I was also thinking about writing an article like this. This is such a massively overblown worry that AI companies who are seeking regulatory capture love to roll out whenever they are trying to gin up some FUD. Creating viruses at home is extremely difficult, even if you have a perfect instruction manual and someone sitting behind you telling you what to do. It's full of trial and error and validating each step requires rigor. It's also a process which requires fairly expensive and specific supplies, which can be easily gatekept. Instead of trying to gate-keep knowledge of biology, we can do things like KYC around specific types of lab supplies (like we already do with fertilizer which can make bombs, or specific types of supplies needed to make nukes). Heck the Biden admin already added a KYC requirement for plasmids and plasmid companies already have implemented screening for sequences which could be dangerous.
  • skew-aberration 17d ago
    Viruses probably too hard but I think small scale bioterrorism is much easier and doesn't require fancy enzymes. I think this is actually the best argument for regulation of current models. It's even happened pre-AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
    • alevskaya 16d ago
      You can read up on the synthesis of sarin on wikipedia.
    • colingauvin 16d ago
      Most people do not understand how easy it would be to make anthrax. Technology is not the reason it basically is never done or deployed. AI cannot meaningfully move this needle. Let's look at it in an inverse way. Making a single drug that impacts a single protein, intelligently, from the ground up, has arguably never actually been done. Despite unbelievable financial incentive. And with AI.
    • Dig1t 16d ago
      Well we're talking about new types of capabilities here, Sarin is a chemical which can be manufactured with a basic understanding of chemistry and searching with google.com. AI will not allow bad actors to do anything they couldn't have done already with google's 10 blue links. Again the same logic applies though, it takes significant effort and money to create sarin, it requires a lot of rigor. That is the limiting factor, not the knowledge of how to make it. If we are worried about people making sarin in their garage we can do many things to control the supply of chemicals needed to make it. We don't need to try to restrict knowledge of chemistry. "regulation of current models" basically implies that open source models will be heavily restricted if not banned outright and guarantees that intelligence will be owned and gatekept by a duopoly.
• nprateem 17d ago
  I agree. It'll probably just hack and disable our water works, power stations and supply chains and let us all starve.
• zekefoppa 17d ago
  I'm far from anything resembling an expert in biological weapons, but this seems to me puzzlingly overconfident in the opposite direction. > PhD students in 2026 using state-of-the-art AI software are spending months or years trying to design simple peptide binders that inhibit some enzyme or pull down some protein This confuses me, as state-of-the-art AI software is moving quite quickly. Any software that is currently state-of-the-art AI.. hasn't existed for years, maybe not even for months. It also seems quite odd to claim that there are no sufficiently dangerous diseases when we have high-security research labs dedicated to exploring.. exactly these kinds of diseases. And, even if it's not a disgruntled teenager, it just takes one leak from a lab that has 10xd productivity using AI tools. This is a real risk that existed before AI, one that I think we can now confidently say that society is under-prepared for since 2020. It is certainly magnified by AI, even if it's not 100x. The author even seems to recognize this: > So, if you’re worried about AI-designed superviruses, think COVID, not Ebola. And if you’re now a little less worried, maybe you understand where I’m coming from. This is exactly where I think most people are starting from, and that's _why we're worried_.
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  • ghurtado 17d ago
    If you quote the article, then you are implicitly telling others that you have read it. But it's pretty clear you have not?
    • zekefoppa 16d ago
      methinks it is more likely that I read it but missed the point? Would you be able to share what I misunderstood?
  • skeledrew 16d ago
    Think of it this way: if it wasn't generally crazy difficult to create even somewhat effective bioweapons (due to the reasons given in the article), there would've been non-trivial use of said weapons in terrorism, war, assassination attempts, etc over time. But we're still "stuck" with using primarily bombs, guns and - to far less extent - poisons.
• Boxxed 17d ago
  Yeah, if only.
• mikestylz 17d ago
  The magical level of intelligence required is not really a flaw of the argument's deductions, it is its very premise. If you believe that there is a possibility of an AI working on itself, you get the approximate differential equation d/dt f(t) >= C*f(t). In plain English, at least some proportion of development's progress goes back into future development. The (least case growth, assuming equality) solution to this is an exponential function, and exponential blowup leads to stupendous and magical seeming results. I then ask - what is evolution if not a dumb optimization process? How are we supposed to believe that it devised miracles such as the human mind, insect flight, echolocation and so on while denying the possibility of a future EXTREMELY power simulation to do the same? I went in really wanting to be convinced by this article for the sake of my own mental health, but I am disappointed. What we really need for such a statement is concrete physical evidence that a virus is simply incapable of having such facilities. Or perhaps an equivalence established showing biological defense is no harder than offense. Until it exists, I will continue to worry.
  • crazygringo 16d ago
    > What we really need for such a statement is concrete physical evidence that a virus is simply incapable of having such facilities. A major focus of the article is about the fundamental tradeoffs in how viruses operate. Was that not enough for you?
    • mikestylz 16d ago
      It is not, because we should not expect a manufactured technology to behave exactly as an evolved one. My understanding is there is not much incentive for a virus to kill off all its hosts. When they do it is largely an accident, and it is not uncommon for a severe virus to eventually get replaced by a less virulent and thus more successful strain. It's pretty hard to hill-climb evolution to such a point since the virus could starve itself in the process. And induction on evolution feels misguided to me. Consider our species. A million years ago it would have seemed completely reasonable to state that the absence of advanced tool use in the kingdom of life suggests it is biologically impossible. After all, such a thing had not occurred in hundreds of millions of years! To be clear, I am not saying that such a virus will exist eventually. I am just noting that the arguments displayed here are not completely tight, and there are unknown unknowns at play. Some things are unfalsifiable. This is common.
• janalsncm 17d ago
  > When people believe that AI could figure this out on its own, without first running extensive and expensive basic science experiments, they have left the realm of science and have entered what can only be described as religion. I strongly agree with this. Too many people have the Arthur C Clarke quote infecting their brains. So much of science is contingent on the physical world and cannot be determined from first principles i.e. by thinking hard about it. (Sorry Plato, you can’t think your way to the moon.) You need increasingly precise measurements, which means increasingly complex tools which means…supply chains. Science requires supply chains. Magic doesn’t.
  • ewild 17d ago
    And if an agent were to amass a large sum of Bitcoin you don't think people wouldn't do things for money? Especially if they don't realize they are doing part 1 of 160 parts that get it to the end goal of a virus?
    • denismi 16d ago
      What amount of bitcoin buys "generate highly accurate empirical measurements for the transmissibility rates of this novel virus across realistic human populations"? How about mortality rates? The loop required to make language models useful through iterative test and evaluation needs to be able to both operate and escape premature detection, which seems... implausible?
  • GlibMonkeyDeath 17d ago
    Especially when it comes to biological things. Just look at Novartis this week - three failed clinical trials of promising drugs (https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/novartis-faces-third-clinical-trial-setback-in-a-week-as-muscle-drug-fails-126090800579_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/novartis-faces-...) These are some of the brightest minds on the planet, spending oodles of money on things they think they understand. And they didn't work.
    • ovrnightr 16d ago
• jbethune 17d ago
  Well, not with THAT attitude...
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• geodel 17d ago
  Well, this is disappointing.
• bananaflag 17d ago
  The author doesn't have a security mindset.
• hex4def6 16d ago
  Now here’s a real risk involving measles that I sometimes worry about. What if the measles virus experienced a set of immune escape mutations where suddenly existing vaccines no longer work? If this happened the consequences would be horrifying. We’d have an immediate, world-wide measles epidemic long before we could develop and roll out a new vaccine. What’s the likelihood this will happen? Informed estimates are that it is low. But realistically speaking, even if the likelihood is low, it’s probably higher than the likelihood that a disgruntled teenager will design a supervirus with AI. So, something to think about. I'm confused. Would a bit of gain-of-function exploration + measles virus genome = supervirus? I'm no biologist, but it seems like the genome is readily available. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001498.1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001498.1 And it seems like the spots that have to be mutated are already known about: https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/researchers-clarify-why-measles-doesnt-evolve-to-escape-immunity/ https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/researchers-cl... And this experiment has already been done: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8080110/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8080110/ Five minutes of research suggests the sites -- Loop Epitope etc -- only need a few pairs of mutations each. this feels doable... It's not creating a supervirus from whole cloth, but why bother. Measles without a vaccine would be a catastrophe.
  • skeledrew 16d ago
    Even with the genome available, a lot of humans will have to be experimented on to ensure the efficacy of the "supervirus". Just as we still need a lot of experimentation to determine the efficacy of new treatments.
• colingauvin 16d ago
  Oh my God THANK YOU. I do not have the words how tired I am of hearing tech people and economists talk about biology.
  • mrits 16d ago
    Do you need to be a physicist to realize an asteroid is going to kill you ?
    • colingauvin 16d ago
      Arguably yes. I would wager no one killed by an asteroid in the history of people killed by asteroids realized what was happening before they died.
      • sph 16d ago
        Nor being an astronomer makes you able to predict every asteroids’ trajectory. 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.
      • mrits 16d ago
        Not much of an argument as you just proved the counter point. You don't need a specialist for what is now common knowledge.
    • smitty1e 16d ago
      Refereeing who is permitted to say what based upon credentials is a popular sport these days.
      • colingauvin 16d ago
        I would never advocate they not be allowed to say it. But I also am sick of hearing wildly unrealistic takes.
  • busyant 16d ago
• fergal_reid 16d ago
  I am not a biology person, but, candidly, this is a bad article, because the author is generalizing from the properties of viruses that tend to arise naturally, and using this to argue about the properties of deliberately designed viruses. Firstly, it's not even clear that naturally occuring viruses can't be extremely lethal. There are examples (eg black death). Even the existence of rare examples should be concerning, if attempting to argue against the possibility. But even if there were no natural examples, it could just be because the ecosystem is in a balance, which them unlikely. That doesn't preclude someone from designing one. To use an analogy. Natural predator prey ecosystems tend to be in balance. You could look around the world, before modern humans, and conclude that superpredators aren't a real threat, because predators that eat their prey too rapidly typically then die out. Thus most ecosystems you observe are in some balanced state. But this doesn't mean modern humans can't come along, using their superior intelligence, and act as a superpredator. Ask the wolf population of western Europe. If something is stopping us from doing this more often, it's alignment rather than capability. You can't generalized from the typical behaviour that you see in a balanced natural ecosystem, and use that to say it proves there are no much more dangerous possibilities. If the author made first principles argument about the inherent difficulty of doing something bad, even with abundant intelligence, I'd be much more reassured; or about defense offense asymmetry favouring defence. What's here seems very naive.
  • thaumasiotes 16d ago
    > Firstly, it's not even clear that naturally occuring viruses can't be extremely lethal. There are examples (eg black death). You realize the black death didn't arrive and then go away again, right? It was extremely lethal, once.
  • UncleMeat 16d ago
    > Firstly, it's not even clear that naturally occurring viruses can't be extremely lethal. There are examples (eg black death). The plague is not actually that easily transmitted. Basic social hygiene prevents it. It is still around and causes very nearly zero problem today.
    • 16d ago
• jsnell 16d ago
  Native americans had like a 95% population mortality rate from infectious diseases in the first generation of European settlement, no? Measles, smallpox, flu, etc. The mortality rate from those diseases was higher than today because the population had no immunity at all, leading to both higher transmission rates and higher mortality rates. This would be true of an engineered virus as well. And it wasn't just the one virus, it was an entire continent's infectious disease arsenal landing in overlapping waves. Again, something you'd do if you were trying to maximize damage. So I don't find the bulk of the article about it being impossible for a virus to have this effect all that compelling.
  • BobbyTables2 16d ago
    We might even get to relive history the way things are going…
  • colingauvin 16d ago
    This number gets cited a lot but it's actually the excess mortality of post-European contact, and it's not content wide, it's specific to Mexico. It also includes climate change, famine, war, relocation, etc.
  • georgemcbay 16d ago
    > So I don't find the bulk of the article about it being impossible for a virus to have this effect all that compelling. I think the other flaw the article has it that it assumes the bad actor is doing targeted design. That they or the AI has some specific virus in mind meeting a set of predefined criteria and they are fighting the biology to hit that predefined target. But what if the AI-enabled bad actor is a true chaos agent and has no defined goal and they are using tooling that AI helped them construct to perform genetic reassortment pretty much at random to see what happens? Most of what they create won't really do anything. But some of it will. And there's a low but non-zero probability of Something Really, Really Bad.
    • alevskaya 16d ago
      [dead]
• Footnote7341 16d ago
  Everyone is gathering around patting themselves on the back, but smallpox depopulated an entire continent. Clearly it is possible for a highly transmittable deadly virus to exist.
• woopwoop 16d ago
  The author seems to be arguing that it is biologically impossible or something to have a virus with the same transmission properties as COVID but higher virulence. I don't understand what principle he is invoking to make this claim.
  • mrits 16d ago
    The cope principle
  • alevskaya 16d ago
    Because fatality and virulence stand in fundamental tension with each other when it comes to epidemiology. You can't magic that tension away or just invent other incompatible properties of a hypothetical virus (stealth, latency, virulence, fatality, etc etc etc) just because you want to tell a ghost story. Biology: (immunology, cell biology, virology) impose constraints!
    • woopwoop 16d ago
      What do you think the word virulence means?
• andai 16d ago
  tldr: 2029 -> 2049
• deleted 16d ago
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• BatFastard 16d ago
  Has anyone read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_War:_A_Scenario https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_War:_A_Scenario Sounds like there already exist some pretty crazy biological weapons in existence. I dont know if it will be 5 years or 20 years, but at some point some fanatic will try to kill the rest of us.
• deleted 16d ago
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• VCFundedGenYer 16d ago
  We don’t need this nonsense. The author doesn’t actually know that for certain.
• megaman821 16d ago
  AIs have no concept of time. If they wanted to wipe out humans they would release a virus that increases infertility by a small amount, and wait a few hunderd years for population collapse.
• senectus1 16d ago
  I dont 100% agree. I agree an AI isnt going to create one. but the number of raving loons out there that think 5G chips are in vaccines are going to go absolutely stark raving mad the next time there is a pandemic. then they'll be super susceptible to AI generated political adverts from the next fuckwit political hack trying to get into power. looking at how the world is panning out atm moment... I expect AI to have a massive influence on the sort of idiots that will get voted into power and make decisions that will get a vast number of us killed. by all sorts of means... war, famine, unregulated corporate poisoning... AI is going to get us killed, because we'll use it to kill ourselves.
• slovenlich 16d ago
  "Well you see, a thief will never be able to open this lock, because it needs a key. And to build the key you first need to invent steel and build all of the complex machinery that can process metals. Which is completely unfeasible for a common thief to accomplish".
• brador 16d ago
  “I can’t do it so you can’t” is not a valid argument in the age of AI. That’s the point.
• Protostome 16d ago
  Obviously, the scenario portrayed in The Economist article is a little far-fetched. I agree that a teenager won’t plan a deadly virus with ChatGPT anytime soon. But I think the overarching argument here is mostly correct, a lot of really complicated science has been democratized to the point where it is much more accessible. You don’t need a team of brilliant molecular biologists, biochemists, and bioinformaticians to do what you can do with a few agents today. And the pace is increasing. this is the nature of exponential improvement when you approach what Kurzweil popularly call "singularity" Sure, today, peptide inhibitors and enzyme design are still out of reach for many tasks, I know because that's what I also, as the post authoer, do for a living for the past 15 years. However, only five years ago, protein structure prediction was an open problem, and everyone in our field now regards it as solved. I’m not worried about a lone wolf taking advantage of AI to design viruses, but I’m concerned that the bar has been lowered to the point where many rogue governments or terrorist organizations can now access tools and skills that were previously available to very few people with a prohibitively high price tag. The author here looks at the problem with the tunnel vision of a scientist well versed in the field. I know because I’m one as well, but experience has taught me to be more concerned about the unknown unknowns. There could be a team somewhere working on something we haven’t thought about. It doesn’t have to be a population destroyer, either. It could be a tactical infectious agent or something that isn’t meant to kill everyone but ends up being far more dangerous than it initially seems, with implications that are much longer lived than the team anticipated. I’m not saying we should ban AI or do anything radical, but I do think that with great power comes great responsibility, and we aren’t dedicating enough effort to the responsibility part. There are many benchmarks measuring AI capabilities, but not enough measuring safety. It is becoming increasingly important to develop those.
• xtiansimon 16d ago
  > “Oh man. I used to think Smith was a person with informed opinions, but reading his take on a topic close to my own expertise makes me question this premise.” Snap. Mike drop. Why continue? lol. Blogs are so snappy. I love a good hot take, and make many myself. But one thing that bugs me are personal insults. We’re living in the most abusive time I can recall. You want to bitch-slap someone do it with a smile, or just tackle their arguments. Otherwise, get bent.
• burnt-resistor 16d ago
  Unintentional consequences or accidents enabled by technological/AI ubiquity is the more probable existential threat. We might accidentally poison ourselves, harm infrastructure or supply chain(s) in some very damaging manner, or do something else unwise that isn't readily apparent due to increasing system complexity.