Watch Final Hours https://ept.ms/LetsWatchFinalHours Summary: Scientists in the U.S. recently announced that for the very first time, they were able to use AI to create viruses never before seen in nature. Don’t worry, though: these new viruses were designed to target specific strains of E.coli bacteria that have become resistant to natural antibacterials. This development marks a major milestone in the field of synthetic biology, and it opens the door to potential rapid advancements in human healthcare. Maybe these AIs can develop never-before-seen cures to horrible diseases. However, on the flip side, I think after living through the early 2020s ... we can all imagine how this can go horribly wrong. So today, let’s go through the…
Nick Bostrom, philosopher and author of the New York Times bestseller “Superintelligence”, warns that the AI models built to design new drugs carry the same capability to help design new pathogens and explains why safeguards can be stripped out.
AI-enabled bioweapons are a potentially catastrophic yet manageable risk — if government, the scientific community, the public health sector and leading tech companies can develop appropriate safeguards, a new report argues. Why it matters: The debate over AI and public safety isn't one that the health care or research communities can ignore. Driving the news: A RAND report out this week outlines nine mitigation strategies targeting a range of actors who could use AI to design and release a biological weapon. - While there's already considerable debate about government oversight and safeguards around frontier AI companies, RAND calls for more controls and a wide range of cross-industry cooperation. - It recommends protecting the same…
What's the common thread connecting AI advances, biological breakthroughs, a preponderance of high-risk-high-reward research, escalating geopolitical tensions and a hollowed-out U.S. public health sector? - They all heighten the risk that one day a lethal human-made pathogen will emerge, either accidentally or intentionally, and we won't be ready for it. Why it matters: The same advances that make this a pivotal moment for medical innovation are intensifying the risk of catastrophic lab mishaps, though how significant a risk is hotly debated by experts. - "It is a very small tweak from trying to target a disease, and making gene therapies to try to target a disease, to turning a virus into something that can be much more detrimental,"…
The goal of the research is to achieve medical advances, but the technology raises concerns that it could invent dangerous pathogens and cause pandemics.
We ask almost every AI architect and leader the same thing in private: What AI risk worries you most? - Almost all of them fire back the same response: a killer pathogen, spreading too silently, widely and quickly to stop. Why it matters: The rare agreement among AI experts flows from the belief these advanced models could help a bad actor create a deadly pathogen before the government and industry perfect detection and prevention systems. This isn't a likely scenario. And some of AI's biggest optimists reject doom scenarios. - It's simply a plausible one as AI gets better at understanding our biological vulnerabilities, much like it has our cyber ones inside large nonhuman systems. Driving the news: The experts aren't hedging. In a new…
