AI won't design a supervirus that kills us all
I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus
A computational biologist and AI researcher pushes back on economist Noah Smith's fear that AI will soon enable a teenager to unleash a civilization-ending supervirus. Drawing on his own work designing viruses and AI systems for protein design, he argues that biology's fundamental tradeoffs—between lethality and transmissibility—make such a scenario virtually impossible. Even if AI could design the perfect pathogen, building and distributing it would remain daunting. The real pandemic threats, he says, are viruses like measles and COVID-19, not sci-fi fantasies.
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.
- slovenlich
"Well you see, a thief will never be able to open 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".
- janalsncm
> 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.
- jsnell
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.
- woopwoop
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.
- Footnote7341
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.