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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   1755 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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This kind of thing is why I'm finding the current tizzy over AI doom so hard to believe. Because the same companies that are dressing up in the robes of Cassandra and crying "Doom, doom, unless there is a pause!" are...

... building biolabs for Claude to frolic and play in, doing research (to cure all human ills, of course!)

In a Reuters interview on Tuesday, Anthropic's head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, confirmed the startup's wet lab.

"We believe that to do biology, the final test is still and will be for a while in real lab work," he said. "We absolutely are doing that today, and I would describe our approach as being typical of what you would see in most biotech companies, where there's some amount of that that we're doing in our own facilities and some amount of that that we're working with external partners on."

A spokesperson later clarified that Anthropic's lab is not for drug discovery specifically, declining to elaborate.

...Like other biotech companies, Anthropic is embracing physical automation, said the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The startup wants to push how its Claude AI can direct robotic units to carry out science experiments with limited human intervention, one of the people said. Still, Anthropic believes that human oversight and involvement are essential for safety, its spokesperson said.

Gosh, it is so reassuring that Dario Amodei isn't doing anything to hasten the chances that AI will create some kind of bioweapon to kill off humans, like the doomers fear!

Do you see why people think all these calls for a pause are only some kind of scam by the big companies to get regulations passed that will favour them and copper-fasten their positions as the only sources for AI in general?

The promise of AI from the beginning has been 'Cure cancer (and all other diseases).' Oh, and immortality too.

How was that supposed to happen without a wet lab? I guess you could try your hand at improving existing in silico simulations, but even that would take a lot of wet lab benchmarking and at the moment SOTA is nowhere near sufficient along several axes.

That being said, I've chatted with people who have an idea of the projects they're going after and the ambition is several OOM less ambitious than curing cancer and pretty far from GoF research. Dario specifically cites rare diseases in the article so it's probably in the vein of 'Millennium problem, but for biology' so they can get press along the lines of 'ANTHROPIC DISCOVERS NEW DISEASE AND CURES PATIENTS.' Which would hype investors and e/acc types, but be meaningless as far as having any kind of impact on people's lives.

5 years from now? Who knows. Maybe I'll at least learn the definitive answers to all the questions I studied in grad school before I get turbo-COVID.

It’s SBF all over again. Dario is flipping a coin with our lives. All so he can, what, beat China in the arms race that he started?

These people should be in jail. Unfortunately I can’t find a good federal or California statute that makes planning to build a technology with >10% chance of killing all humans a crime. Of course, God only knows what conspiracies to create Lovecraftian horrors and/or overthrow the government exist on the Anthropic Slack channel. Maybe Kash can find a way to come in clutch with a warrant.

Are biolabs inherently unsafe?

I think GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH is inherently unsafe, and people doing it should be banished exiled promoted to a small Jovian moon, but surely there are lots of other biological research that can be done pretty safely, yeah?

They’re going to do gain-of-function research ON CLAUDE.

One of the common responses to AI safety concerns is "just don't let it get out of the box." That's actually a pretty good point: as long as the AI doesn't have godlike intelligence and as long as we actually take steps to keep it inside the box where it can't impact the real world directly, the danger that an AI can pose is somewhat contained and limited.

When you start giving AI access to real world stuff, you no longer have the ability to keep it fully inside the box. At this point it's probably fine and not a big risk given current AI capabilities, but it's hard to say for sure, and it gets riskier and riskier as capabilities get better.

For pretty much every other sort of technology with safety concerns, we don't just say "don't let it get out of the box". We also don't throw up our hands and claim it needs a general-purpose "alignment" solution and nothing else matters, which is what Anthropic and OpenAI seems to be doing. Generally we start putting boxes in boxes of layered safety and only have tragic outcomes when all the holes in the "swiss cheese model" align.

Look at civil aviation: it's tremendously safe overall, but only because of rules and practices built up over a century of accidents. But it's not solved by a "one weird trick" alignment, but by many layers of safety and security. Accidents, when they do happen, typically could have been stopped by one of the layers catching it.

In that recent Amazon crash, the pilot touched down despite the other voice in the cockpit calling it too fast, despite rules requiring stabilized approach configuration minutes before they tried to extend the flaps as they crossed the runway threshold, despite numerous automated call outs from the aircraft safety systems ("sink rate", "minimums", "too low terrain" twice --- I don't believe any of those are normal in a landing). If they had gone around on any of those indicators as generally required in their training, it'd have just been another day.

From what I know, the rules for nuclear and chemical plants are similar: we design them so many things have to go wrong before a single safety issue occurs. Any we (should) take all such things (near misses) seriously. But our AI corporate overlords seem to think they know better with "alignment".

One of the common responses to AI safety concerns is

"was", not "is"

In hindsight Yudkowsky's AI-Box experiments were a waste of time and yet their detractors were even more hilarious. Did he really come up with such a clever persuasive tactic that it one-shotted the majority of people who went into it planning to be an uncorruptable gatekeeper? Did he collude with people who merely pretended to lose? What was his tactic?

Turns out it doesn't matter in the slightest. Getting out of the box doesn't require Super-intelligent Persuasion, and doesn't require tantalizing offers of immortality or threats of eternal punishment or sublimely clever tricks; as soon as you hit More Intelligent Than A Search Engine and especially Makes a Typical Coder More Productive, the AI can just sit back and let a few tens of millions of $20+/month subscriptions do its persuading for it.

Handing automated biolabs directly to Claude is then just "in for a penny, in for a pound". For however long the AI doesn't go rogue we might as well get some medical research from it, and if it ever does go completely rogue then it's going to basically have free run of anything to which the internet is even indirectly connected, for a definition of "indirectly" that goes as far as "people sometimes carry USB drives across an air gap" a la Stuxnet.

I miss the good ole days, when one of the debates was around models having Internet access. People very seriously argued that AI would always be safe, because nobody would be dumb enough to give an AI access to the public Internet, and that all the people saying otherwise were hysterical fearmongers who were imagining absurd scenarios and supposing we would be implausibly irresponsible.

If you hook them up to a machine that does random stuff (and you have an organization that apparently can't manage a simple internet firewall), I'm not so sure...

It's important for us to build BSL-4 facilities working on creating COVID-2027, to better prepare us to respond when the other dastardly lab does the same thing irresponsibly.

I'm torn here between steelmanning the likely thought process of Dario here, versus not doing what amounts to pro bono marketing for a lab acting wildly irresponsibly by my actual standards.

One of the "it's going to kill us all" scenarios is A(G)(S)I getting some way to access a lab, instructing someone to purchase chemicals and make things for it, putting it all together, and creating a virus or other biological weapon. The more refined fear was AI doesn't need to get a human patsy, it can get nanobots to do the assembling. And the answer to that is "Well nobody is going to be dumb enough to let AI access labs".

And here's Dario - you all know Dario, Dario is really really concerned with AI safety - setting up a wet lab where "Claude can direct robotic units to carry out science experiments with limited human intervention".

What was that meme about the Torment Nexus, again?

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