posted in Technology

floofloof@floofloof@lemmy.ca

Scientists Sound Alarm on AI-Generated Biological Viruses Amid Unregulated Industry

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/70021

www.commondreams.org/news/ai-creating-viruses
Common DreamsScientists Sound Alarm on AI-Generated Biological Viruses Amid Unregulated Industry | Common Dreams"The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not," a pair of researchers said.
MalReynolds@MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
edited

Replying to @⁨floofloof@lemmy.ca⁩

We’ve been living with the human capability to make and deliver super lethal viruses for what 40+ years and have methods in place to control it at the manufacturing level. ‘genAI’ is way too incompetent at this stage to achieve both a functional virus and evade those manufacturing safeguards and likely LLMs always will be, too stochastic. This is quite aligned to look how scary our AI is marketing.

That said, virus is one of the studied extinction event scenarios for a true AGI/ASI. It would be prudent to double down on the manufacturing security, or, you know, go Butlerian at least until we have an excellent grasp on alignment (IMO you can’t align an ASI, it’s literally beyond our comprehension). But capitalism’s gonna capitalist, existential threat be damned, just look at global warming.

Dune WikiButlerian JihadLast Jihad redirects here. For the book by Sumer and Kautman, see The Last Jihad. "We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!" ― Minister-companion of the Jihad[src] The Butlerian Jihad, also known as the Great Revolt as well as commonly shortened to the...