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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2799 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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To put a 5% CFR into perspective, the US military's plans for responding to a bioattack give the CFR for bubonic plague "with prompt, effective therapy" as 5%. A quick google suggests this is based on third world countries where plague is endemic, and "prompt, effective therapy" means cheap antibiotics and not much more. And of course it is a whole-population CFR.

So a disease with 5% CFR specifically among young healthy people with access to 1st-world medicine is significantly worse than the plague. I don't think we would be laughing off a plague pandemic, let alone the hypothetical @2rafa pandemic.

There is a reason why I give "Computer, what is the DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Yersina pestis?" as an easy example of an existential AI risk when talking to normies.

It’s worth noting that the Black Death spreads by fleas on rats- mass spread in the first world is rather unlikely, and there are periodic outbreaks these days but mostly among the homeless.

Y. pestis is really good at undergoing selection for respiratory spread during the course of a plague and is much better at being a viable respiratory pathogen than most bacteria...It still won't ever be an existential scale risk for 1st world governments no matter how extensively modified someone makes it

There is a reason why I give "Computer, what is the DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Yersina pestis?" as an easy example of an existential AI risk when talking to normies.

Normies don't need an AI to find that information. That information is available on google and in a trivially digestible way. What isn't trivial is that manufacturing your designer AI risk level bioweapon at the scale required to get it out into the environment and start snowballing requires $10 million in specialized facilities, equipment and reagents. At the moment surveillance for this type of attack is ok. AI, ironically probably makes this scenario less likely because the surveillance infrastructure is going to exponentially outpace AI assisted attempts to establish a new bioweapons lab. So many different pieces need to come together and just a handful of them need to be flagged to stop it completely.

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