AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.
I'm a wildly pro-AI dude, but the idea that this is an existential threat makes me think one thing: "you consume too much dystopian content."
A lot of things could be an existential threat, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, climate change, the end of the Flynn effect, cratering birth rates, whatever.
You can always pick out a particularly dystopian vision of the future if you're so inclined. The doom narrative is sells ad revenue, so it's a huge amount of what we all consume online, but it's not really that mapped out to reality...
Somethings get worse, some things get better, in general, the average QoL for the average human is getting better. If we decide not to go to global thermonuclear war, or we decide to unplug any killer AIs that we invent, we'll probably be ok. If we can reduce the population to 3,000-ish humans after the Toba eruption, we can probably survive whatever self-imposed calamities we can create.
I think there's something particularly noxious about the present nihilism trend I see in a lot of this doom themed content. People should go outside and touch grass.
> "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." -- Ronald Reagan at the United Nations [0]
We are going to be fine as long as we remember to be nice to each other, starting towards the people who are adjacent to us.
Having recently read both of Annie Jacobsen’s books — _Nuclear War_ and _Biological War_ — I’m much more concerned about a bioweapon than a nuclear one.
Her conclusion to the latter book comes out and says it, paraphrasing here:
> Nuclear war is terrifying in its destruction, but the chain of command limits the risk of a rogue actor. Whereas bio weapons can be designed and manufactured in relatively low tech environments with equal or greater magnitudes of impact.
Nukes also cannot kill everyone. Nuclear winter was proven to not be based on solid evidence, the earth remains very habitable after all nukes have gone off.
Show me that proof please. So far the counter evidence has not been convincing. FWIW I don’t think nuclear war will annihilate us. But it won’t be pleasant.
Actually, I've seen the take that the previous poster has made too. The wikipedia page is pretty good IMO. Proof of a hypothetical future event is pretty hard to get, but here's the wiki rabbit hole (if you're anything like me you'll find this fascinating and spend the next couple hours clicking links - you're welcome!).
Annie Jacobsen is awesome, her book about Area 51 was riveting, but I also cannot unsee "Capitalist Realism" and the idea that we keep picturing civilization-ending catastrophes because we don't want to go to work in the morning, and walking/biking everywhere and living in a small community is amazingly appealing to us at a base level. We yearn for the lifestyle of the apocalypse survivor, but none of us want to go through the apocalypse. Generally, I think we kind of say, "oh, it'll be the end of the world" because most of us (myself included) lack the imagination to really look beyond linear extrapolations of the status quo most of the time.
The regulation at the DNA Printer level works I think, as long as nobody invents a good at home DNA printer, but if they do that there is no need for custom viruses, somebody can take an existing one that is known to be deadly and just print it.
Aren't technological constraints such as these short lived? Even if s home DNA printer won't be available this decade, the technology will come at some point. It's far better to have both legal and social policy in place before then - though the legal policy will probably not matter at all.
That’s what I’m thinking. If we can restrict EUV technology to the West then why can’t we restrict DNA manufacturing? Not to the West in this case but to capable governments like with Nuclear power.
An EUV factory is a moderately sized building in its own right[0]; on the other hand, DNA is manufactured separately inside most of the cells in your body[1], the plant on your windowsill, the mould on your bread…
I want to say I've already read some articles about hobbyists buying previous generation equipment from labs. The entire supplychain would need to be locked down with used equipment being returned to manufacturers for there to be any security.
its not really a question of will, its a question of difficulty. if it were easy and cheap to build EUV processes, no amount of complaining and posturing would prevent someone from reproducing that.
Not sure if you realize it but biology is a lot harder to regulate. Most of the secret sauce in biotech is in the manufacturing process, not the reagents itself.
I will give you a classic example, the Lipid Nanoparticle used for the delivery of mRNA vaccine is the real lynchpin of covid vaccines. The media never talks about it. Any biology student knows how lipid bilayers work (they are the basic building block of cells, it's like asking a programmer what a terminal is). But the process of manufacturing those lipid nano particles at scale was the main bottleneck for delivering mRNA to the target cell. That was the trade secret. It's not sexy or hot like mRNA so the media doesn't talk about it. It's why many developing countries tried to make their own vaccines and failed completely. The mRNA was the easy part but what use is a bunch of mRNA if you can't get them delivered to cells?
Any biology student (even high school ones) can describe how a cell membrane works. But designing a man-made one that can be created at scale and be guaranteed to fuse with mammalian cells is mostly a matter of trial and error. It's a bit like finding viable pseudo linear memory use alternatives to the basic attention architecture in machine learning. Every lab has their own take on it.
With AI nowadays the search space of viable biotech ex nihilo experimentation is much smaller given that you can just prompt it to give you plausible protocols.
You can literally send an email to one of hundreds of companies that do exactly this. They have no way of knowing whether you're asking them to synthesize a virus or a drug candidate or what.
No, you literally cannot. Synthesizing a stretch of DNA is trivial, and what you can send away for [1].
Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.
[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.
For each of the years below, what is YOUR estimate for how long would it take a person of 80th percentile intelligence with $10,000,000 (2026 money) to get from "I'd like to kill a lot of people" to a working virus?
And one wouldn't make one from mRNA. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Still: the difficulty isn't comparable to EUV machines or refining uranium and does not form a comfortable security barrier.
The only difference between people who are quite concerned and you is that you are either 1) actually blind to or 2) choosing to ignore even the first derivative on those barriers.
The people "got LLM-brain" are saying: "Wow those barriers are coming down fast"
And you're saying: "There are still barriers"
Both are true, but only one is helpful for thinking about the future. The other is hardly even helpful for thinking about the present, and I've never seen a quasi-intelligent person do it in lieu of some other motivations in their reasoning.
No, the sophomoric LLM argument does not apply here. The world is not a big computer.
The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.
So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.
Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.
Your example of how easy it is to control outputs behind specialized knowledge is a thing (recreational drugs) that exist in mass quantities every place on the planet at consumer-accessible prices?
I'm sure some of them would, but they're not required by law to do so. And historically the way you'd do this is by actual fragment/substring matches. But these are novel viruses now. So what you really want to do is try to predict whether a novel genome is pathogenic... which is itself obviously a very hard technical problem.
That’s not too much a concern I think. Most of the real pathogenic qualities result from known genes. Inventing a totally novel virus that is also pathogenic is basically science fiction right now. Splicing together known components that could be bad in combination is closer to current technology.
No, of course not. In 2010 I went to a guest lecture from a guy who worked on the scanning algorithm for IDT. A few years later, there was a minor scandal when someone in a nearby lab used a personal credit card for a purchase and got a big shared account locked. So not only were they scanning the content of synthesis orders, they were validating payment back to labs. In 2010, when HTTPS was rare and facebook didn't even offer it.
The legit synthesis sites have been scanning and authorizing since before the internet was encrypted. You suggested otherwise, demibabs expressed surprise, and was correct to express surprise because your implication was incorrect.
The black market exists -- but comes with black market problems.
You email the RNA strand (a text file) to a lab along with some money. The lab converts that information into a physical object (read: virus) and sends it back to you in the mail.
Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist.
And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens?
Really? mRNA? What kind of meme nonsense is this? You really don't know anything about these protocols do you.
Still, even though your estimates are silly, they aren't silly enough to change the conclusion that this isn't a comforting security barrier, so I suppose we agree on that much.
One of the easiest and most effective AI regulations would be to simply require all these labs to run all incoming requests through a suite of the most advanced models asking if the request is likely to be a pathogenic agent.
Yes probably true. Unfortunately we need only one defector lab to severely degrade the overall effectiveness of this approach (leaving aside the effectiveness of the detection models themselves).
Who’s going to simply require that? There are ~200 sovereign nations on the planet, they’re not all going to do it, or have effective enforcement if they do.
This is the kind of thing that would be relatively easy to convince nations to sign up to*; actually enforcing, I suspect you're right.
* there's not an obvious benefit to being the one nation that says "you know what? We want to be known as 'the nation whose biolab insecurity wrecked the world', because taking blame works out so well for everyone.", though I'm fairly sure a large portion of the world will be totally willing to wargame the impact of hosting a lab as a deadman switch so nobody else attacks them first…
I think it's certain that people will try recreating old viruses or making alternatives to them. It will be too easy. Make 5 variants of small pox, 5 variants of sars. Release them at once all around the world to make it hard to fight. It will be too easy for some crazy angry people to do this. I just hope that our defenses and ability to sequence them and respond.
Get ready for the next adventure in the saga of 12 Monkeys, with AI starts like Bruce Wills, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer, coming to a bio lab around you. The experience of a life time one you can't miss, it is in the air.
Something I've been worried about for years is the proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people, in potentially irreversible ways. Combined with automation, this is a recipe for disaster. We're clearly lacking in the ability to regulate and govern ourselves, and real world market forces (as opposed to the hypothetical free market) encourage reckless aggressiveness at the level of companies and countries.
Although, I must admit, as a doomer, I'm pleasantly surprised things aren't already worse than they are.
This is what AI safety activist Connor Leahy calls offense-defense asymmetry. Imagine if a nuke could be created with household materials. We got lucky that wasn't the case, but we didn't know that it wasn't the case before studying physics. If we weren't so lucky that physics happened to turn out that way, we already wouldn't exist, because the offense would be so much stronger than defense, we wouldn't stand a chance even with the best surveillance systems.
A profitable prediction markets trader who goes by the alias semiotic rivalry posted this prediction on his X account recently:
> Prediction: in 1-2 years, almost everyone will agree that open sourcing the best AIs is totally crazy as the AIs become capable of autonomous hacking of most humans and institutions, serious terrorism and creation of biological weapons, etc.
And I mostly agree with him. As much as it's awful to have such a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few governments or corporations, as far as I can tell there are no easy answers here, only a matter of trade offs and different risks.
Im fairly certain that the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb is far less well-protected than the general public is led to believe. The only part that is actually difficult is obtaining a sufficient quantity of enriched uranium without somebody dropping a JDAM on your lab.
If the Manhattan project could build a fat man in 4 years your state university's physics department has somebody who could reproduce that given the necessary resources. It might take them longer than four years given that they are not staffed with the modern equivalents of Oppenheimer, teller, et al but they could do it within a human lifetime if they actually wanted to cause a mass-casualty event and weren't afraid of the aforementioned JDAM.
> proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people
did you mean greater number of people with less resources?
EDIT: thanks to others that point out how you can interpret this differently, which I think is: "it is now easier for smaller teams with fewer resources" rather than my original interpretation of "power is now concentrated so that fewer people can do this than before"
I had the same reaction, but I think they meant fewer as in "requires less consensus-building to wield meaningful power." Used to have to convince lots of people to go to war in order to kill a couple million people. Fast approaching a one- or two-man weekend project.
I’d say that is almost the definition of technology: that which allows doing ever more with fewer and fewer people and resources.
And technology doesn’t really care what you use it for. It can be constructive or destructive.
It “only” enhanced local destructive potential, until last century. Then it got to the point where a huge effort could produce a truly global catastrophe. And then a bit smaller effort. And technology continues to march on.
Every person's utopia is someone else's dystopia and vice versa. What you've described is clearly some peoples (ie. already billionaires) version of the best possible world. Not so much for the rest of us though...
I'm so surprised that HN is this much anti-government. I'm a doomer myself, I fear the rich, I fear the terrorists, and I think the only one that
- can save my life,
- is interested in saving my life
- i have some control over
is the state.
Yes, they are currently snatching kids of (illegal) immigrant parents and it is horrible, but who else would protect me against lone nuts in a basement, or robor armies of trillionairs?
My comment may have been misinterpreted, it was not meant to be anti-government. It is meant to be anti-centralized control though, regardless of the form it takes.
You are describing some people driving with FSD today. I bet hundreds or maybe thousands of people a day try letting it drive for a while without paying any attention. The car watches your eyes to be sure you don't do this, but people try to defeat that too. Sunglasses make it hard to tell what's going on.
But even though there are a few people tricking the "are you paying attention" check, probably more people complain about it being too careful and overbearing.
No, a human could do (and have, many many many times, see like half of molecular biology) this as well. If anything this will help with vaccine development.
Edit: I'm a PhD biochemist that has done a fair bit of virus modification. Love the downvotes. Never change HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Same reason it couldn't be a problem to sell aerosolized anthrax at the hardware store. Humans have (many many times) made aerosolized anthrax. Can't see any conceivable problem with more people having access to it.
I agree with you. I favor the view that humans are generally morally good when taken on the whole. There already exists the technology for ne'er-do-wells to engineer viruses and unleash them on the world. But I submit that A) there aren't many people who want to do that in the first place; and B) there's a vanishingly small amount of people who want to work with those people to help them achieve it.
No, I'm saying AI has not introduced any fundamentally new capabilities to anyone in this space. Making a virus that grows in a cell is one thing. Making a virus that is an existential risk to humans is altogether another and would require significant new capabilities that do not exist and are not likely to from these training data. (Pre-existing sequences).
AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.
I'm a wildly pro-AI dude, but the idea that this is an existential threat makes me think one thing: "you consume too much dystopian content."
A lot of things could be an existential threat, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, climate change, the end of the Flynn effect, cratering birth rates, whatever.
You can always pick out a particularly dystopian vision of the future if you're so inclined. The doom narrative is sells ad revenue, so it's a huge amount of what we all consume online, but it's not really that mapped out to reality...
Somethings get worse, some things get better, in general, the average QoL for the average human is getting better. If we decide not to go to global thermonuclear war, or we decide to unplug any killer AIs that we invent, we'll probably be ok. If we can reduce the population to 3,000-ish humans after the Toba eruption, we can probably survive whatever self-imposed calamities we can create.
I think there's something particularly noxious about the present nihilism trend I see in a lot of this doom themed content. People should go outside and touch grass.
> AI is an existential threat
So is nuclear annihilation. Yet, here we are.
> "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." -- Ronald Reagan at the United Nations [0]
We are going to be fine as long as we remember to be nice to each other, starting towards the people who are adjacent to us.
[0] https://youtu.be/dYiUI6y1nKg?si=agkJpCEZj3m_WZz0&t=915
Having recently read both of Annie Jacobsen’s books — _Nuclear War_ and _Biological War_ — I’m much more concerned about a bioweapon than a nuclear one.
Her conclusion to the latter book comes out and says it, paraphrasing here:
> Nuclear war is terrifying in its destruction, but the chain of command limits the risk of a rogue actor. Whereas bio weapons can be designed and manufactured in relatively low tech environments with equal or greater magnitudes of impact.
The good news is that bioweapons can’t kill everyone. A handful of percent will remain to repopulate the Earth.
Nukes also cannot kill everyone. Nuclear winter was proven to not be based on solid evidence, the earth remains very habitable after all nukes have gone off.
Show me that proof please. So far the counter evidence has not been convincing. FWIW I don’t think nuclear war will annihilate us. But it won’t be pleasant.
Actually, I've seen the take that the previous poster has made too. The wikipedia page is pretty good IMO. Proof of a hypothetical future event is pretty hard to get, but here's the wiki rabbit hole (if you're anything like me you'll find this fascinating and spend the next couple hours clicking links - you're welcome!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#Likelihood_o...
Annie Jacobsen is awesome, her book about Area 51 was riveting, but I also cannot unsee "Capitalist Realism" and the idea that we keep picturing civilization-ending catastrophes because we don't want to go to work in the morning, and walking/biking everywhere and living in a small community is amazingly appealing to us at a base level. We yearn for the lifestyle of the apocalypse survivor, but none of us want to go through the apocalypse. Generally, I think we kind of say, "oh, it'll be the end of the world" because most of us (myself included) lack the imagination to really look beyond linear extrapolations of the status quo most of the time.
The regulation at the DNA Printer level works I think, as long as nobody invents a good at home DNA printer, but if they do that there is no need for custom viruses, somebody can take an existing one that is known to be deadly and just print it.
Aren't technological constraints such as these short lived? Even if s home DNA printer won't be available this decade, the technology will come at some point. It's far better to have both legal and social policy in place before then - though the legal policy will probably not matter at all.
A custom designed virus is potentially far more deadly than something like ebola, because animals/plants will have zero resistance to it.
It'd be like releasing an invasive species into an ecosystem that has not co-evolved to co-exist with it.
That's a brilliant invention!
I will kickstart a home DNA printer
I will name it Torment Nexus
I will be rich
That’s what I’m thinking. If we can restrict EUV technology to the West then why can’t we restrict DNA manufacturing? Not to the West in this case but to capable governments like with Nuclear power.
An EUV factory is a moderately sized building in its own right[0]; on the other hand, DNA is manufactured separately inside most of the cells in your body[1], the plant on your windowsill, the mould on your bread…
[0] "43 freight containers and weighing in at 165 tons." - https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2024/12/03/asml-releases...
[1] not in red blood cells
My understanding is DNA synthesis is now like a 2nd or 3rd year undergrad tier challenge and doesn't even require much specialized equipment.
Versus EUV which one could dump literally unlimited amounts of money into solving and still probably fail for decades.
I want to say I've already read some articles about hobbyists buying previous generation equipment from labs. The entire supplychain would need to be locked down with used equipment being returned to manufacturers for there to be any security.
I saw a sweet electron microscope on eBay, for 2000 quid. If I had the space...
its not really a question of will, its a question of difficulty. if it were easy and cheap to build EUV processes, no amount of complaining and posturing would prevent someone from reproducing that.
Not sure if you realize it but biology is a lot harder to regulate. Most of the secret sauce in biotech is in the manufacturing process, not the reagents itself.
I will give you a classic example, the Lipid Nanoparticle used for the delivery of mRNA vaccine is the real lynchpin of covid vaccines. The media never talks about it. Any biology student knows how lipid bilayers work (they are the basic building block of cells, it's like asking a programmer what a terminal is). But the process of manufacturing those lipid nano particles at scale was the main bottleneck for delivering mRNA to the target cell. That was the trade secret. It's not sexy or hot like mRNA so the media doesn't talk about it. It's why many developing countries tried to make their own vaccines and failed completely. The mRNA was the easy part but what use is a bunch of mRNA if you can't get them delivered to cells?
Any biology student (even high school ones) can describe how a cell membrane works. But designing a man-made one that can be created at scale and be guaranteed to fuse with mammalian cells is mostly a matter of trial and error. It's a bit like finding viable pseudo linear memory use alternatives to the basic attention architecture in machine learning. Every lab has their own take on it.
With AI nowadays the search space of viable biotech ex nihilo experimentation is much smaller given that you can just prompt it to give you plausible protocols.
The design was never the hard part. You still have to make the thing.
Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.
There’s YouTubers who do this [0]. I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high
- [0] https://youtu.be/aoczYXJeMY4?is=OqObeGzZB6AKL0Jk
Not even close to the same thing. That's taking an existing viral transfection system and swapping in a single gene.
Thermo Fisher sells a kit to do this [1]. It's something you might do a few thousand times on the way to actually generating a novel virus.
> I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high
I'd argue that it probably already happened, and had nothing to do with AI.
[1] AAV transfection.
“There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
But the next one (or the first one, if that one wasn’t manmade) will probably be much worse.
>the risks of another synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact
You can literally send an email to one of hundreds of companies that do exactly this. They have no way of knowing whether you're asking them to synthesize a virus or a drug candidate or what.
No, you literally cannot. Synthesizing a stretch of DNA is trivial, and what you can send away for [1].
Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.
[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.
https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo...
There you go!
Steps from your mailbox to an actual virus is a few days of bench work.
Yes, that's one of the ones I was talking about.
That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.
Here let's just get specific.
For each of the years below, what is YOUR estimate for how long would it take a person of 80th percentile intelligence with $10,000,000 (2026 money) to get from "I'd like to kill a lot of people" to a working virus?
You can provide a range for each if you'd like.
In the year 1800 – how long?
1950?
2020?
2026?
2050?
2200?
And one wouldn't make one from mRNA. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Still: the difficulty isn't comparable to EUV machines or refining uranium and does not form a comfortable security barrier.
I generally agree -- the actual risk is from serious/state actors, and for those, the barriers are not high.
I'm just saying that people are focused on the wrong problem because they've got LLM-brain.
The only difference between people who are quite concerned and you is that you are either 1) actually blind to or 2) choosing to ignore even the first derivative on those barriers.
The people "got LLM-brain" are saying: "Wow those barriers are coming down fast"
And you're saying: "There are still barriers"
Both are true, but only one is helpful for thinking about the future. The other is hardly even helpful for thinking about the present, and I've never seen a quasi-intelligent person do it in lieu of some other motivations in their reasoning.
Yet.
No, the sophomoric LLM argument does not apply here. The world is not a big computer.
The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.
So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.
Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.
Your example of how easy it is to control outputs behind specialized knowledge is a thing (recreational drugs) that exist in mass quantities every place on the planet at consumer-accessible prices?
No. My argument is that many things in the world are hard in a way that computers cannot solve, and the existence of LLMs does not change that.
Synthetic biology is one of those things.
Uhhh right... but all the other hard parts are being solved too, correct?
LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down.
Without LLMs, a reasonable security apparatus would be:
Step 1. Disallow dissemination and synthesis of known pathogens
Step 2. Watch closely anyone with the decades of training required to come up with their own pathogen
Would they not be like “hmmm this one looks kinda similar to a known virus”
They really just synthesize anything for you?
I'm sure some of them would, but they're not required by law to do so. And historically the way you'd do this is by actual fragment/substring matches. But these are novel viruses now. So what you really want to do is try to predict whether a novel genome is pathogenic... which is itself obviously a very hard technical problem.
That’s not too much a concern I think. Most of the real pathogenic qualities result from known genes. Inventing a totally novel virus that is also pathogenic is basically science fiction right now. Splicing together known components that could be bad in combination is closer to current technology.
No, of course not. In 2010 I went to a guest lecture from a guy who worked on the scanning algorithm for IDT. A few years later, there was a minor scandal when someone in a nearby lab used a personal credit card for a purchase and got a big shared account locked. So not only were they scanning the content of synthesis orders, they were validating payment back to labs. In 2010, when HTTPS was rare and facebook didn't even offer it.
"There are websites where you can just buy prescription drugs online?"
You: "No, of course not. I once went on a website to buy a drug, and they made go to a doctor and get a prescription and send it to them"
The legit synthesis sites have been scanning and authorizing since before the internet was encrypted. You suggested otherwise, demibabs expressed surprise, and was correct to express surprise because your implication was incorrect.
The black market exists -- but comes with black market problems.
If that's the understanding you came away with, it was clarified in my immediately following comment.
Glad we agree that there are labs that will solve very hard parts of creating a novel virus, either by accident or by negligence.
It was dishonest then for you to imply that readily accessible commercial labs didn't take reasonable precautions and it's dishonest now, too.
Define "reasonable precautions"?
Here's a red team exercise where researchers successfully bought fragments of the best known pathogen in the world, never mind a novel one.
What reasonable precautions failed to catch this but we could expect to catch a novel virus that "kinda looks like" a known virus?
https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/08/shouldnt-be-easy-buy-syn...
Yes in much the same way you can literally build a rocket and go to the moon.
You may be skipping a few of the involved steps.
What involved steps are those?
You email the RNA strand (a text file) to a lab along with some money. The lab converts that information into a physical object (read: virus) and sends it back to you in the mail.
What step is missing?
The part where that service doesn't exist and isn't close to existing.
https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo...
Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist.
And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens?
Answers: No, no, and no.
Really? mRNA? What kind of meme nonsense is this? You really don't know anything about these protocols do you.
Still, even though your estimates are silly, they aren't silly enough to change the conclusion that this isn't a comforting security barrier, so I suppose we agree on that much.
One of the easiest and most effective AI regulations would be to simply require all these labs to run all incoming requests through a suite of the most advanced models asking if the request is likely to be a pathogenic agent.
Yes probably true. Unfortunately we need only one defector lab to severely degrade the overall effectiveness of this approach (leaving aside the effectiveness of the detection models themselves).
Who’s going to simply require that? There are ~200 sovereign nations on the planet, they’re not all going to do it, or have effective enforcement if they do.
This is the kind of thing that would be relatively easy to convince nations to sign up to*; actually enforcing, I suspect you're right.
* there's not an obvious benefit to being the one nation that says "you know what? We want to be known as 'the nation whose biolab insecurity wrecked the world', because taking blame works out so well for everyone.", though I'm fairly sure a large portion of the world will be totally willing to wargame the impact of hosting a lab as a deadman switch so nobody else attacks them first…
That’s one interesting way to generate demand for AI vendors if the AI bet doesn’t pay off /s
I think it's certain that people will try recreating old viruses or making alternatives to them. It will be too easy. Make 5 variants of small pox, 5 variants of sars. Release them at once all around the world to make it hard to fight. It will be too easy for some crazy angry people to do this. I just hope that our defenses and ability to sequence them and respond.
I don’t think it will be easy. Making a virus involves far more than reading some instructions.
Get ready for the next adventure in the saga of 12 Monkeys, with AI starts like Bruce Wills, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer, coming to a bio lab around you. The experience of a life time one you can't miss, it is in the air.
Don’t we already have plenty of deadly viruses around? Why would you design a virus when rabies, anthrax and Ebola, for starters, exist in the wild?
Something I've been worried about for years is the proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people, in potentially irreversible ways. Combined with automation, this is a recipe for disaster. We're clearly lacking in the ability to regulate and govern ourselves, and real world market forces (as opposed to the hypothetical free market) encourage reckless aggressiveness at the level of companies and countries.
Although, I must admit, as a doomer, I'm pleasantly surprised things aren't already worse than they are.
This is what AI safety activist Connor Leahy calls offense-defense asymmetry. Imagine if a nuke could be created with household materials. We got lucky that wasn't the case, but we didn't know that it wasn't the case before studying physics. If we weren't so lucky that physics happened to turn out that way, we already wouldn't exist, because the offense would be so much stronger than defense, we wouldn't stand a chance even with the best surveillance systems.
A profitable prediction markets trader who goes by the alias semiotic rivalry posted this prediction on his X account recently:
> Prediction: in 1-2 years, almost everyone will agree that open sourcing the best AIs is totally crazy as the AIs become capable of autonomous hacking of most humans and institutions, serious terrorism and creation of biological weapons, etc.
And I mostly agree with him. As much as it's awful to have such a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few governments or corporations, as far as I can tell there are no easy answers here, only a matter of trade offs and different risks.
Im fairly certain that the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb is far less well-protected than the general public is led to believe. The only part that is actually difficult is obtaining a sufficient quantity of enriched uranium without somebody dropping a JDAM on your lab.
If the Manhattan project could build a fat man in 4 years your state university's physics department has somebody who could reproduce that given the necessary resources. It might take them longer than four years given that they are not staffed with the modern equivalents of Oppenheimer, teller, et al but they could do it within a human lifetime if they actually wanted to cause a mass-casualty event and weren't afraid of the aforementioned JDAM.
> proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people
did you mean greater number of people with less resources?
EDIT: thanks to others that point out how you can interpret this differently, which I think is: "it is now easier for smaller teams with fewer resources" rather than my original interpretation of "power is now concentrated so that fewer people can do this than before"
No, I think they mean that it used to take a giant lab full of specialists with lots of funding to do lots of damage before.
Now, the worry is a lone nut in a basement with no money could pull off an act of bio terrorism.
I had the same reaction, but I think they meant fewer as in "requires less consensus-building to wield meaningful power." Used to have to convince lots of people to go to war in order to kill a couple million people. Fast approaching a one- or two-man weekend project.
Fewer as in the size of an individual group, even though the total number of people who could find themselves in such a group is greater.
I think you would get a kick out of reading this paper on this exact topic, called the Vulnerable World Hypothesis https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
However I think the result is disappointing, it concludes the only solution is a massive preventative surveillance state and global governance.
I’d say that is almost the definition of technology: that which allows doing ever more with fewer and fewer people and resources.
And technology doesn’t really care what you use it for. It can be constructive or destructive.
It “only” enhanced local destructive potential, until last century. Then it got to the point where a huge effort could produce a truly global catastrophe. And then a bit smaller effort. And technology continues to march on.
Every person's utopia is someone else's dystopia and vice versa. What you've described is clearly some peoples (ie. already billionaires) version of the best possible world. Not so much for the rest of us though...
I'm so surprised that HN is this much anti-government. I'm a doomer myself, I fear the rich, I fear the terrorists, and I think the only one that
is the state.Yes, they are currently snatching kids of (illegal) immigrant parents and it is horrible, but who else would protect me against lone nuts in a basement, or robor armies of trillionairs?
My comment may have been misinterpreted, it was not meant to be anti-government. It is meant to be anti-centralized control though, regardless of the form it takes.
Yes, we should, but even here distribution is an serious issue.
Were we safer when the viruses were object oriented?
Doubly because they’ll also use AI to manage the AI pandemic response.
Betteridge's law strikes again
Wait, why are you not worried?
It's super cringe and d e c e l to think technological advancement could have any dangers whatsoever.
Just like in a car, the true demonstration of intelligence is closing your eyes and slamming the pedal to the floor.
You are describing some people driving with FSD today. I bet hundreds or maybe thousands of people a day try letting it drive for a while without paying any attention. The car watches your eyes to be sure you don't do this, but people try to defeat that too. Sunglasses make it hard to tell what's going on.
I see it's still happening as of July 2026 -
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319863/20260707/sunglasse...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/zt1kgt/anyone_...
But even though there are a few people tricking the "are you paying attention" check, probably more people complain about it being too careful and overbearing.
No, a human could do (and have, many many many times, see like half of molecular biology) this as well. If anything this will help with vaccine development.
Edit: I'm a PhD biochemist that has done a fair bit of virus modification. Love the downvotes. Never change HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Same reason it couldn't be a problem to sell aerosolized anthrax at the hardware store. Humans have (many many times) made aerosolized anthrax. Can't see any conceivable problem with more people having access to it.
I agree with you. I favor the view that humans are generally morally good when taken on the whole. There already exists the technology for ne'er-do-wells to engineer viruses and unleash them on the world. But I submit that A) there aren't many people who want to do that in the first place; and B) there's a vanishingly small amount of people who want to work with those people to help them achieve it.
That doesn’t invalidate the point, you’re just saying it’s already a risk
No, I'm saying AI has not introduced any fundamentally new capabilities to anyone in this space. Making a virus that grows in a cell is one thing. Making a virus that is an existential risk to humans is altogether another and would require significant new capabilities that do not exist and are not likely to from these training data. (Pre-existing sequences).
Enzymes haven't introduced any fundamentally new capabilities. Any reaction they catalyze could just happen on its own.