[trhway]

We’ve just had a virus - specifically engineered to be highly infectious for humans - escaping the lab (which was running very lax safety level - BSL2 instead of required BSL4) and killing millions and shutting down half the globe. So I’m wondering what safeguards and prevention you’re talking about :)

[LeoPanthera]

Don't spread misinformation. This myth is widely believed only by Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Virus_...

[trhway]

This myth is documented in the EcoHealth Alliance publicly available NIH and DARPA grants documents among others. Wrt your link - Wikipedia unfortunately isn’t subject to the law like those grants.

[alganet]

Covid is irrelevant to the discussion I opened. You're trying to steer the discussion into a place that will lead us nowhere because there's too many artificial polemics around it.

The only thing to be said about it that resonates with what I'm concerned with is that anyone that is good in the head wants better international oversight on potential bioweapons development.

[4793273022729]

He says and quotes Wikipedia.

[alganet]

You're trying to deflect the discussion into a polemic tarpit. That's not going to work.

I do not endorse the view that covid was engineered. Also, I consider it to be unrelated to what I am concerned about, and I will kindly explain it to you:

Traditional labs work with the wet stuff. And there are a lot of safeguards (the levels you mentioned didn't came out of thin air). Of course I am in favor of enforcing the existing safeguards to the most ethical levels possible.

However, when I say that I am concerned about AI being used to circumvent international agreements, I am talking about loopholes that could allow progress in the development of bioweapons without the use of wet labs. For example, by carefully weaving around international rules and doing the development using simulations, which can bypass outdated assumptions that didn't foresaw that this could be possible when they were conceived.

This is not new. For example, many people were concerned about research on fusion energy related to compressing fuel pellets, which could be seen as a way of weaving around international treatises on the development of precursor components to more powerful nuclear weapons (better triggers, smaller warheads, all kinds of nasty things).

[trhway]

>For example, by carefully weaving around international rules and doing the development using simulations, which can bypass outdated assumptions that didn't foresaw that this could be possible when they were conceived.

Covid development in Wuhan was exactly a careful weaving - by means of laundering through EcoHealth - around the official rule of "no such dangerous GoF research on US soil". Whether such things weaved away offshore or into virtual space is just minor detail of implementation.

[alganet]

Still irrelevant to what I brought up.