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Symmetry is not guaranteed. If someone creates a deadly pathogen with a long pre-symptomatic period (which we know is possible, since HIV works this way) it could infect essentially everyone before discovery. Yes, powerful AI would likely rapidly speed up the process of responding to the threat after detection, especially in designing countermeasures, but if we don't learn about the threat in time we lose.

There are people today who could create such a pathogen, but not many. Widespread access to powerful AI risks lowering the bar enough that we get overlap between "people who want to kill us all" and "people able to kill us all".

This is not a gotcha argument, this is what I work full time on preventing: https://naobservatory.org The world must be in a position to detect attacks early enough that they won't succeed, and we're not there yet.

by txrx000023 hours ago|

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For every person that thinks about creating the HIV-like deadly pathogen, there will be millions more thinking about how to defend people against such pathogen, how to detect it faster before symptoms arise, how to put up barriers to creating them, and possibly even how to modify our bodies to be naturally resilient to all similar pathogens. Just like what you're doing here. I don't think we should mark knowledge or intelligence itself as the problem. If that's true then we should be making everyone dumber.

by 8n4vidtmkvmk18 hours ago|

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We were woefully under prepared for COVID despite many people predicting that very event. At the very least, we should have had stockpiles of PPE from the beginning.

It's not enough for a handful of people to predict something. You have to get the entire nation onboard to defend against it.

by jph0023 hours ago|

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In the alternative, asymmetry is guaranteed.

When you only allow gov and big tech access to powerful AI, you create a much more dangerous and unstable world.

by dcre23 hours ago|

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This is just not thinking clearly. There are bad things that are asymmetric in character, dramatically easier to do than to mitigate. There’s no antidote or vaccine to nuclear weapons.

by jph0023 hours ago|

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This is exactly the thinking that has characterized responses to new sources of power through history, and has been consistently used to excuse hoarding of that power. In the end, enlightenment thinking has largely won out in the western world, and society has prospered as a result.

Centralizing power is dangerous and leads to power struggles and instability.

by txrx000023 hours ago|

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It is not easy to create weapons. Why do you think the physical and legal barriers that exist today that prevent you from acquiring equipment and creating nuclear weapons will go away when everyone becomes smarter?