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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5103 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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What makes you believe this is possible? What makes you believe it can't be addressed by the boring know-your-customer sales restrictions we already use to prevent this happening?

I spent some time attending classes at a community biolab in my city, and I think a lot of the necessary prerequisites for a manufactured virus are surprisingly cheap.

I'm not sure Know Your Customer is going to be a robust defense against a bioterrorist aided by a sufficiently capable open source AI.

What makes you believe that an AI capable of designing a new deadly virus isn't going to be equally good at putting together new regulatory regimes?

Even if I agree that more capable AIs will likely improve our defensive capabilities, there is no reason to just assume that AI-aided defense will always and forever beat AI-aided offense.

I do believe smart people will do their best, aided by even smarter computers, but the parable of the hungry wolf applies here: The wolf only has to win once. You have to win every time.

I spent some time attending classes at a community biolab in my city, and I think a lot of the necessary prerequisites for a manufactured virus are surprisingly cheap.

That's interesting, and sounds like something to be addressed. I'm curious but I won't ask you to give details :P

there is no reason to just assume that AI-aided defense will always and forever beat AI-aided offense The wolf only has to win once. You have to win every time.

The thing is, this seems to me to be a fully generalisable argument against libraries and publishing textbooks, let alone making biology papers available on the open internet. Is it your opinion that doing these things was irresponsible and we've been lucky so far?

I personally think that these galaxy-sized intuitions are not safe to run a society on. Speaking as somebody with the opposite intuitions, they are far more contingent on your temperament and life-experience than they seem from the inside, and they've also been used to justify a lot of pretty nasty stuff. A lot of the nastier late-colonial stuff was the outcome of a failed rebellion that led to the principle of 'no brown man ever holds responsbility ever again' for instance. (I am not accusing you of racism, it's just an example that came to mind.)

I'm not discarding the possibility of bioterrorism. I would support experimentation to see how far it is possible with frontier AI - I believe this is already happening - and mitigations both in AI and in bio-sellers. However, I feel it's important not to let a totally generalisable and totally impossible-to-disprove principle of caution take hold of society. I also don't see any reason why our potential bioterrorist should be too dumb to do a terrorism the old fashioned way but smart enough to outwit and jailbreak a 10T model.

Is it your opinion that doing these things was irresponsible and we've been lucky so far?

I mean, we've actually done worse than that, we've maintained gain-of-function research and biosamples of the most deadly viruses on Earth, and this has predictably backfired - even if you don't think COVID was a GoF experiment gone wrong, the Soviets goofed up and let out smallpox.

So, #1, if we are concerned about bioterrorism, we should stop doing GoF research and discard remaining samples of horrorviruses that we preserve for biological weapons research. But, #2, in my opinion "AIs could make a murdervirus" is an attempt to reskin the "AIs could make nanotech that eats everything" fear via something that seems more plausible.

I think that any bio-attack is ample grounds for concern, but there's a sort of motte-and-bailey dynamic where people retreat to "what, you don't believe in viruses" if questioned about how likely a bioweapon is to be a particularly above-baseline threat and then when your back is turned they suggest the virus will be perfectly effective at killing enough humans to destroy civilization.

As far as I know, a perfectly effective human-killing virus isn't impossible - but I don't know that it's possible, either. From what I understand, viruses and other bacteria inhabit a sort of unstable triangle between lethality, transmissibility, and virality. They also aren't stable, and it is hard to know how they will behave without testing it. So while a bio-attack could be very bad and we should take every reasonable effort to prevent it, I also think the specific scenario is used to smuggle in existential fears via a back door greased by zombie movies, and I'm not sure it's at all warranted.

This is broadly my position too, including the GoF and grey goo stuff.

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