Apparently AI under the control of a rogue actor is undoubtedly going to kill us all with a synthesized virus.
Let me run you through how brain rotted the world is now that this is even being taken in the slightest seriousness.
You cant just prompt an AI model, hey make me a humanity ending virus, no mistakes and send it to the printers. That’s not how reality works. To generate a world ending virus. You will need the following chain of events. If each one fails, the whole chain of events fail.
Step A: AI generates a viable novel pathogen sequence.
Highly unlikely without massive human intervention and iterative wet-lab feedback. Let’s say 1% chance for a non-expert using public tools.
Step B: The sequence is stable enough to be synthesized and remain infectious.
Many generated sequences are nonsense or unstable. Probability of viability: 5%.
Step C: It bypasses DNA synthesis screening (Know-Your-Customer rules).
Screening is imperfect but effective against known dangerous motifs. Probability: 10%.
Step D: The actor has access to a BSL-3/4 lab capable of handling high-consequence pathogens.
You forget extensive of testing of the novel virus canidates is needed so you can validate the virus’s virality. You can’t do this in a garage. You need specialized infrastructure, containment, waste disposal, and ethical blind spots. Probability for a random bad actor: <0.1%.
Step E: The virus achieves optimal transmissibility AND lethality simultaneously.
Biologically, these often trade off. High lethality usually kills the host before they spread it widely. Finding the “sweet spot” is incredibly hard. Probability: 1%.
Step F: It spreads globally before detection/response.
Modern surveillance, travel restrictions, and medical response are faster than in 1918 or 2020. Probability of total global saturation before countermeasures: 5%.
Any one of these fail and you dont get an outbreak.
Total Probability:
0.01 ×0.05 ×0.10 ×0.001 ×0.01 ×0.05 =0.00000000000025%
And before you say state actor will do this. They already can if they want to.
It’s not some random dude in a garage, it’s the unregulated tech overlords and autocrats that could do it. AI isn’t intelligent, but it has amazing pattern matching capabilities. It’s going to create all sorts of advancements in science, and to deny the problems that comes with this is both silly and dangerous.
If we want to fight ai, we have to understand it. It’s not a conscious omnipotent god like the tech bros think, but it’s also not a useless fad. Real scientists are warning of its potential consequences, and governments all over the world are investing trillions to improve it.
In a decade, it should be at least twice as powerful as it is today, and that is indeed a big deal.
mate im not defending these tech fucks. im saying they are talking out of their arse. can they do it ? yes probably. but they are using the narrative for regulatory capture.