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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   1760 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?

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?

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.

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.

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