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All of those sound bad, but also very speculative?
We have a recent worked example of what can happen with GoF (true regardless of the true origins of covid-19); shouldn't we prioritize making sure that doesn't happen again over "stop Skynet"/"Butlerian Jihad Now" type stuff?
It's like hearing that Ford Pintos can explode due to their fuel tank design and responding with "OMG, cars can explode! Terrorists might start planting car bombs, I should work on anti-terrorism!"
The last one is very speculative; I have a suspicion it might be impossible. The middle one is somewhat less speculative; something akin to it is probably possible, but there are degrees of success and you're probably looking at more like "eats organic matter at a foot a day" than the "lol eats planet in minutes" sci-fi shit. The first one is proven possible by PNA, the aforementioned terribility of RuBisCO, and the wide variety of possible biomolecules only some of which are used. Anybody who knows second-to-third-year biochem knows that that design is 100% chemically and physically possible; the roadblock is the incredible difficulty of designing a full biochemistry ex nihilo (it'll be a while before anyone succeeds at this without AI aid, although I'd still rather nobody tried). I get that not everyone does know this, but seriously, this is uncontroversial in terms of "is this possible, given a blueprint?"; it is. That's why I said it's the best-case of "what the final form of bioweapons looks like"; they can be worse, but they can't be better.
I mean, I'd rather that 200 million people die next year from a pandemic over everyone dying 10 years from now. I'd rather that even if I'm one of the 200 million. I'm not seeing the issue.
Even with AI aid, I dont think anyone would bother with this. You know something about biochem, and I know something about numerics. By the time you have the compute to simulate without any experiment all considered molecules reliably enough to not have a catastrophic error in one of them, you have long ago cracked all encryptions ever made, found the vaccum instabilites if there are any, etc. Why bother with even grey goo at that point?
As Yudkowsky impolitely notes, it's not like AI aid means you can't also do experiments.
I understood you to be talking about the one-shot?
Because I said "ex nihilo"? I was making a distinction between "modify an existing biochemistry in various ways" and "invent a wholly-new biochemistry" (the latter is far harder), not talking about research methods.
...maybe you thought I meant in silico? I didn't.
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The issue is that you are prioritizing problems that are arguably possible (well, one of them) but have never manifested in an even directionally similar way over one that just happened a few years ago, repercussions of which were quite severe and still being felt.
I resisted "millenarian cultist" analogies so as not to be uncharitable, but you didn't want to talk about Ford Pintos, so fuck it:
It's certainly possible that Jesus will descend and start casting the goats (that's you) into a lake of fire at any moment -- this is roughly the worst thing that could happen (for you); shouldn't you prioritize Christian worship more highly than (I assume) you do?
I have actually spent years learning biochem and have a minor degree of fame under my real name due to my precociousness in doing so. Biochem is not a spook and understanding of it is actually meaningful. It is... irritating to have some random just go "nuh-uh". If I could give you the kind of feel for biochem that would lead you to see all of this as obvious I would; I already gave you the quick rundown and you dismissed it.
I think the policy of "ignore all dangers until they've happened at least once" is not a very good one even for normal dangers, and is practically a reductio ad absurdum in the case of apocalyptic dangers (because apocalyptic dangers kill off humanity, thus being impossible to look back on, it reduces to "ignore all apocalyptic dangers", which if any of them are real means you sleepwalk into them).
A good-faith survey of the current world basically rules out interventionist deities being active on Earth. Deism is quite plausible (note the identity of deism with the simulation hypothesis), but while it is plausible that such a creator might judge us after death, there is basically no way to tell what the grading rubric actually is. Maybe it's the Christian God. Maybe it's Allah who'll smite me for idolatry if I think Jesus is divine. Maybe God's a social justice warrior. Maybe God agrees with Jack LaSota. Maybe God is testing for ability to act rationally about X-risk. I dunno, and for the most part the big question mark cancels out to "this shouldn't affect how I live my life" (because for every rubric there's an anti-rubric which cancels it out; this is the problem with Pascal's Wager if you aren't privileging the "Christian God" hypothesis, because there might also be an anti-Christian-God who punishes Christians).
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