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by estearum 3 days ago
No, the source of the misapprehension is that you are ignoring how easy it is to source the input components and combine them into a bioweapon these days.

Correct, there is a small number of people who have been able to do it at high cost for a long time.

Now, there is an ever-growing number of people who are able to do it at an ever-falling cost.

That's the entire issue. Do you dispute that this is what's happening?

> I would bet good money that flooding the FBI's tip line with junk about every teenager trying to learn "what be a mitochondria" does more harm

Did someone propose doing that? Or is this a strawman?
1 comments
skinfaxi 3 days ago
> No, the source of the misapprehension is that you are ignoring how easy it is to source the input components and combine them into a bioweapon these days.

Citation needed. Where are these home biolabs? Why haven't any leaked yet like home meth labs?

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estearum 3 days ago
Who said anything about a home biolab? Are you thinking a possible solution is just to block the terrorists, irresponsible corporations, or evil governments from LLMs? Obviously not.

In any case, the "home biolab" required to do this stuff gets smaller and more accessible every day. Biochemistry, like virtually every other complex procedural field, has become heavily outsourced. You can literally order genetic fragments even of known pathogens on the Internet, shipped to your door. There should obviously be much more aggressive restrictions on manufacturing known pathogen fragments, but 1) every money-hungry lab would need to volunteer to participate, and 2) it's totally unclear how they'd detect novel pathogen fragments that unsafe AI would be happy to help predict a couple thousand of.

Today, composing that into a working virus might require an undergrad biochem education, a hundred grand, and a bunch of patience (and risk), but that describes millions of people. As GP pointed out, it wasn't too long ago the group of people with this capability was fewer than a dozen individuals on the planet. And as is obvious, we are trending in one direction. We are not trending the other direction.

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