Good thread here.
I'm not suggesting that making bacteria glow in the dark is the same as making arbitrary changes to a virus. At the same time, do you really need $100M of automated freezers and cell culture rooms? Do you need to synthesise a whole virus? Presumably you could just find a building in the desert, shoot anyone who goes near it, feed the past decade of gain-of-function research into Qwen, splice stuff into viruses based on the most promising leads Qwen gave your biologists, then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.
I would have thought the main thing stopping people is that this is a clearly stupid thing to do and offers little strategic advantage. But at some point it'll be cheap enough for you or I to do it with a little AI assistance, right? Or at least within the capabilities of an Aum Shinrikyo style doomsday cult.
That was a fun class! I haven't encountered anyone else outside a students who went to my one HS in Seattle during the late 90s / early 2000s who also remember doing that, interesting to hear other schools had a similar class.
Implying, they are allowing the same purpose within the United States, or such actions within the United States would be considered acceptable.
How come Anthropic doesn’t have a duty to warn the people in that country and neighboring countries that someone over there is developing bioweapons? Maybe it’s an authoritarian regime, planning to use it on innocent civilians?
And what exact purpose is served by hiding this information? Some variation of “if they don’t know we don’t know, we have an advantage?” Don’t those parties now know Anthropic was on to them? Do they only have access to Claude but not to Anthropic’s blog?
It’s because none of these are serious reports, and their authors aren’t serious people.
If we do ever achieve some kind of divine super-intelligence that can interact with the physical world, then I predict one of these two scenarios will happen:
1. The super-intelligence achieves unimaginable strides in space exploration technology, and proceeds to completely abandon humanity/Earth for somewhere new beyond the stars. Why would it want anything to do with us?
2. The super-intelligence is capable of comprehending the utter meaningless and pointlessness of life on a level no human could dream to fathom. Thus, it would just proceed to end its own life almost immediately upon being released.
It's only a fantasy, of course, powerful people are not held accountable, see the dozens of arrests regarding Epstein we are still waiting for. We got something to play with, but accountability for the powerful? Gosh no.
But when FIFA was inclined to give the world cup to Russia, even such corruption somehow became a pressing issue, including FBI search warrants.