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Consider this a warning; keep posting AI slop and I'll have to put on my mod hat and punish you.
Do you really think you can do that with existing technology? I'm not confident we've seriously tried to make a pathogen that can eradicate a species (mosquito gene drives? COVID expressing human prions, engineered so that they can't just drop the useless genes?) so it's difficult to estimate your odds of success. I can tell you the technology to make something 'with a lengthy incubation time and minimal predromal symptoms' does not exist today. You can't just take the 'lengthy incubation time gene' out of HIV and Frankenstein it together with the 'high virulence gene' from ebola and the 'high infectivity' gene from COVID. Ebola fatality rate is only 50%, and it's not like you can make it airborne, so...
Without spreading speculation about the best way to destroy humanity, I would guess that your odds of success with such an approach are fairly low. Your best bet is probably just releasing existing pathogens, maybe with some minimal modifications. I'm skeptical of your ability to make more than a blip in the world population. And now we're talking about something on par with what a really motivated and misanthropic terrorist could conceivably do if they were well-resourced.
I'm still voting against bombing the GPU clusters, and I'm still having children. We'll see in 20 years whether my paltry gentile IQ was a match for the big Yud, or whether he'll get to say I told you so for all eternity as the AI tortures us. I hope I at least get to be the well-endowed chimpanzee-man.
Boo. Boo. Boo. Your mod hat should be for keeping the forum civil, not winning arguments. In a huge content-filled human-written post, he merely linked to an example of a current AI talking about how it might Kill All Humans. It was an on-topic and relevant external reference (most of us here happen to like evidence, yanno?). He did nothing wrong.
That was a joke man
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Watch your tone or I'll ban you too.
The joke is that I'm not a mod. He is.
Apologies. I guess the joke was on me!
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how do you even tell who's a mod here and who isn't?
Just hang around for over half a decade.
Or, there's this page.
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A certain someone reported you for impersonating a mod. Unlike him, most of the mods have a sense of humor about such things.
[User was banned for this post]
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But sir, I followed the rules and linked it off-site. Please put away that rod, I'm scared :(
You're the domain expert here, not me. I'd hope I'm more informed than the average Joe, but infectious diseases and virology isn't my field. Though if you consider culture-bound illnesses or social contagion like anorexia..
A gene drive wouldn't work for humans. We could easily edit it out once discovered.
Even if we haven't intentionally exterminated a species with a pathogen (myxoma virus for rabbits in Australia came close), we have done so accidentally. A few frogs and rare birds have croaked.
(There are no mistakes, just happy accidents eh?)
Which isn't the worst benchmark for a malevolent AGI that is very smart by human standards.
I'd be talking out of my ass if I claimed I knew for sure how to create the perfect pathogen. I'm >50% confident I could pull it off if someone gave me a hundred million dollars to do it. (I could just hire actual virologists, some people seem insane enough to do GOF even today, so it seems easy to repurpose "legitimate" research).
So am I, I don't want my new RTX 5080 blown up, not that I have a choice if the power connector fails. I also plan to have kids, because I think it's better to live than not, even if life was short. I don't expect them to have a "normal" life by modern standards.
We'll see how this plays out, but I think there's enough justification to take more broad precautions like saving lots of money. That's usually a good idea any way.
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