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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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It's not the idea of a supervirus I have a problem with so much as the idea that once AI reaches human level it will be able to conceive, manufacture, and efficiently distribute such a supervirus in short order.

How about it locates smart, depressed biologists who can be convinced to try to end the world, and then teams up these biologists and gives them lots of funds.

Lab leaks happen already by accident. Why would you believe it's so hard to engineer a lab leak directly given (1)superintelligence and (2) the piles of money superintelligence can easily earn via hacking/crypto/stock trading/intellectual labor?

Its a virus. Once you have ten you are a day or two away from ten trillion.

Infect 20 people and send them on impromptu business trips to every major populated landmass. A human-level intelligence could do this once they have the virus. Mopping up the stragglers on small isolated islands will be cake once you're in control of the world's military equipment.

Infect 20 people and send them on impromptu business trips to every major populated landmass.

How does the AI infect these twenty people and how does it send them on these trips?

It asks them to inject themselves and to go on said trips, and they say "okay!"

If it's good at computational biochemistry, it will have control or significant influence over at least one biotech lab (don't even try to contest this. That's like 90% of the bull case for AGI). At that point, it could lie about the safety profile about the DNA sequences being transcribed, it could come up with a pretense for the company to get 20 people in a room, brief them, and then send them on their way to the airport, it could brainwash the incels working in the lab via AI waifus, and it could contrive some reason for the brainwashed lab incel to be in the briefing room (with a vial of virus of course).

You really should be able to intuitively grasp the idea that a superintelligence integrated into a biotech lab being able to engineer the escape of a virus is a robust outcome.

There are a lot of cruxes in this scenario. Do the humans have no ability to vet these DNA sequences for themselves? Do they bear no suspicious similarities to any currently existing viruses? How are the AI waifus brainwashing these labworkers into opening a vial of deadly virus? Is everyone in the lab taking orders directly from the AI?

Do the humans have no ability to vet these DNA sequences for themselves?

(A) No, basically no-one can know what a DNA sequence will actually do just from reading the letters, and (B) there are several biopharma services operating already which just take your synthesis order off a Google form, and the robots bake it up for you automatically. No human being ever even sees the raw requested sequence.

No. Nobody checks. Easily, apparently. No, they're just doing their jobs.

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