Joseph Miller's Shortform

Joseph Miller

This is a special post for quick takes by Joseph Miller. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

"Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials."

Ayman al-Zawahiri, former leader of Al-Qaeda, on chemical/biological weapons.

I don't think this is a knock-down argument against discussing CBRN risks from AI, but it seems worth considering.

I'm trying to write post, but, well, it's hard.

Many people wrongly assume that the main way to use bioweapons is to create small amount of pathogen to release it in environment with outbreak as an intended outcome. (I assume that where your sentence about DNA synthesis comes from.) The problem is that creating outbreaks in practice is very hard, we, thankfully, don't know reliable way to do that. In practice, the way that bioweapons work reliably is "bomb-saturate the entire area with anthrax such that first wave of death is going to be from anaphylactic s... (read more)

2RedMan2y

1. This has been an option for decades, a fully capable LLM does not meaningfully lower the threshold for this. It's already too easy. 2. This has been an option since the 1950s. Any national medical system is capable of doing this, Project Coast could be reproduced by nearly any nation state. I'm not saying it isn't a problem, I'm just saying that the LLMs don't make it worse. I have yet to find a commercial LLM that I can't make tell me how to build a working improvised explosive (I can grade the LLMs performance because I've worked with the USG on the issue and don't need a LLM to make evil).

1samuelshadrach2y

Makes sense, thanks for replying.