alt Hacker NewsAI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?
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The regulation at the DNA Printer level works I think, as long as nobody invents a good at home DNA printer, but if they do that there is no need for custom viruses, somebody can take an existing one that is known to be deadly and just print it.
The design was never the hard part. You still have to make the thing.
Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.
Don’t we already have plenty of deadly viruses around? Why would you design a virus when rabies, anthrax and Ebola, for starters, exist in the wild?
I think it's certain that people will try recreating old viruses or making alternatives to them. It will be too easy. Make 5 variants of small pox, 5 variants of sars. Release them at once all around the world to make it hard to fight. It will be too easy for some crazy angry people to do this. I just hope that our defenses and ability to sequence them and respond.
Get ready for the next adventure in the saga of 12 Monkeys, with AI starts like Bruce Wills, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer, coming to a bio lab around you. The experience of a life time one you can't miss, it is in the air.
Something I've been worried about for years is the proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people, in potentially irreversible ways. Combined with automation, this is a recipe for disaster. We're clearly lacking in the ability to regulate and govern ourselves, and real world market forces (as opposed to the hypothetical free market) encourage reckless aggressiveness at the level of companies and countries.
Although, I must admit, as a doomer, I'm pleasantly surprised things aren't already worse than they are.
Yes, we should, but even here distribution is an serious issue.
Were we safer when the viruses were object oriented?
Doubly because they’ll also use AI to manage the AI pandemic response.
No, a human could do (and have, many many many times, see like half of molecular biology) this as well. If anything this will help with vaccine development.
Edit: I'm a PhD biochemist that has done a fair bit of virus modification. Love the downvotes. Never change HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.