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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   2139 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.

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