this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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I guess there both are no real biochemists (or whatever the relevant field is), nor well read cybersecurity people (so they know a little bit more than just which algorithms are secure and why mathematically) working at openai as this is a classic movie plot threat. LLMs could also teach you how to make nuclear weapons, but getting the materials is going to be the problem there.
(Also I think there is a good reason we don't really see terrorists use biological weapons, nor chemical weapons (with a few notable, but not that effective exceptions), big bada boom is king)
To be clear: it is all movie plot threats. At the very forefront of the entire “existential threat” space is nothing but a mid-1990s VHS library. Frankly if you want to understand like 50% of what goes on in AI at this point my recommendation is just that you read John Ganz and listen to his podcast, because 90s pop and politics culture is the connective tissue of the whole fucking enterprise.
the relevant field would be microbiology. while someone who got all the way past about the first semester of organic chemistry lab is perfectly capable of making some rudimentary chemical weapons, they won't necessarily be able to make it safely, reliably, cheaply, consistently, and without killing themselves, and universities most of the time put enough sense in everyone's head to not do that. this strictly requires that you know anything about chemistry, too. for bioweapons every single problem pointed to above is orders of magnitudes worse, and you probably need masters degree to do anything seriously nefarious. then you get into the problem of using that stuff, and you need explosives for that anyway. the reason for that
is that barrier to booms is even lower, especially if your country is strewn with UXO. there's also an entirely different reason why professional militaries don't use chemical/biological weapons https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
also the another reason that wiped out any interest in chemical warfare among militaries is that they found out first cluster munitions and then PGMs vastly more useful in the roles they were shoehorning chemical weapons in, not to mention lack of diplomatic and other problems
an incorrect take
Even if one had the means necessary to carry out a bioterrorist attack, simply bombing a place is much easier, faster and safer.
Yeah and also, terrorists are not genocidal death cults. 'terrorists skip getting microbiology phd using chatgpt to create a pandemic that kills untold numbers of beings' is pure fantasy, it gets worse as it turns out that the number of actual bioterrorists deaths in total ever isn't even on the level of a 9/11. People seem to forget that terrorist groups have goals, and they just use terror/violence as a method to reach those goals, sure a few of them may die [chatgpt insert a gif of Bin Laden dressed as Lord Farquaad] but the goal of the terrorist organization is to keep existing to reach their political goals.