Is the term "One-shotting" here even appropriate? In the context of AI one-shotting means giving your llm a single prompt and having it return a surprisingly good result (usually code related) without requiring further input, but the llm (probably) still iterates heavily before showing the results. When Codex "one-shots" something it depends a ton on the fact that code is easily testable.
Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count.
I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. All of these interact and define a design space that nature has been searching for at unimaginable scale for as long as humans have existed. And yet here we are! Seems like “wiping humanity” might be really hard, perhaps impossible for a virus.
Perhaps I’m being uncharitable or insufficiently creative, but these people strike me as deeply unserious in their engagement with the actually real physical world of biology.
EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?
But a virus's "goal" would not be to wipe out a species, that would be a dead end. Nature has explored flight on an unimaginable scale, yet our machines fly better (at least in most aspects) than birds, some even go to space.
Yes, but also viruses do not actually have goals as such - maybe 'replicate' could be their only goal. So a virus _could_ come up with a mutation that kills all its hosts, it just dies out as well in the process. Not very reassuring for the host!
As a slight aside - since I was talking about the weakness of biological analogy on HN recently - the way humans fly is very very different to how (most) birds do. If nanomachines actually could be built by humans (non-biological nanomachines) they might be as different to virus/cells/organisms as plane wings are to bird wings.
Of course, also please do not prompt a frontier model to make nanomachines, either, thankyou.
Biology is very messy and very data constrained. We think that human anatomy works one way- but surgery and radiology are hard because every human is very different.
Missing organs, odd tissue performing unclear functions, different, new or missing muscles.
It’s unclear whether a world ending virus is even possible. There might be better luck with prions, or fungi.
I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds. Our flying machines combust jet fuel, birds can fly by ATP. Not to mention earth-destructing.
And going into space is pointless why would any animal ever develop such a facility :)
> I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds
This kind of nerd sniped me, so I looked into it and turns out no, planes are more efficient than birds!
You have to look at the energy spent for a fixed mass over a fixed distance and for the most efficient birds I looked into, that’s about 300g of fat burned for 300g of “dry weight” for a trip of ~11,000km. (bar-tailed godwits)
For a plane that’s roughly 80 tonnes of kerosene for 170 tonnes dry weight on a similar distance (787). Energy density of fat and kerosene are actually pretty close so you can just look at the kg of fuel burned per kg of payload for the trip. For a bird that’s 1kg of fuel per kg transported and for the plane that’s ~0.5kg per kg. So roughly twice as efficient.
So from a pure energy point of view it’d be more efficient to put all the migratory birds in a 787 than letting them fly on their own!
yes - I don't want to publicize what I know. I worked briefly at a leading university bio lab. It's haunted me for awhile that it would only take 1 disgruntled postdoc to wipe out humanity. There are {AI things} now that will tell you how.
The obvious argument is that natural organisms are restricted in ways that artificial ones are not (e.g. natural viruses are not selected to kill their host too quickly, natural selection can only reach solutions which can be reached incrementally).
>EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?
This does not follow automatically. E.g. it is enormously easier to create an ICBM than to create something capable of intercepting an ICBM. Some technologies naturally benefit an attacker and some naturally benefit a defender.
Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought.
Hah, well, you must have never encountered LessWrong before. It has been like that for well over a decade, in fact it's probably approaching its second decade...
One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.
It started in 2006, although it didn’t have its own site until 2010-ish.
I’m not sure it will ever be given its dues for its prescience. The whole rationality project was started with the explicit aim of upgrading participants’ reasoning abilities so that when AI came along for real, there would be people capable of thinking it through without making all the usual mistakes humans make when trying to reason about things.
In the discussions I read today, everyone involved from commenters up to CEOs are making all and exactly those mistakes, meaning it is in my opinion perhaps the greatest called shot of all time.
He’s right though, this post says nothing non-obvious. It boils down to “AIs that can do some difficult things might be able to do other difficult things. Also: Danger!”.
is the horsepower behind ai speculation less than, greater than or equal to human speculation? seems they’re recursively related, though human speculation has more torque since it occurs naturally or at least as spontaneously as it takes for an epiphany instance to occur.
and then transposed into an ai chat prompt to get the analytical momentum for some grand scheme that gets published to whatever extent ie a comment, blog post, or whatever textual content that then gets ingested as training data…llm rinse repeat. not sure where this is going. is anyone?
On the contrary this couple paragraphs is aimed strictly at 'normies' as in people who are riding the current exponential with little history of thinking about this moment. Most people's beliefs and knowledge needs updating and patching without hoping that 'it obviously follows from assumptions' because most people don't bother to think about the assumptions in the first place.
IOW:
> There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting.
True - for you and the dozens of folks like you, to paraphrase a meme.
I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. All of these interact and define a design space that nature has been searching for at unimaginable scale for as long as humans have existed. And yet here we are! Seems like “wiping humanity” might be really hard, perhaps impossible for a virus.
Perhaps I’m being uncharitable or insufficiently creative, but these people strike me as deeply unserious in their engagement with the actually real physical world of biology.
EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?
As a slight aside - since I was talking about the weakness of biological analogy on HN recently - the way humans fly is very very different to how (most) birds do. If nanomachines actually could be built by humans (non-biological nanomachines) they might be as different to virus/cells/organisms as plane wings are to bird wings.
Of course, also please do not prompt a frontier model to make nanomachines, either, thankyou.
Missing organs, odd tissue performing unclear functions, different, new or missing muscles.
It’s unclear whether a world ending virus is even possible. There might be better luck with prions, or fungi.
And going into space is pointless why would any animal ever develop such a facility :)
This kind of nerd sniped me, so I looked into it and turns out no, planes are more efficient than birds!
You have to look at the energy spent for a fixed mass over a fixed distance and for the most efficient birds I looked into, that’s about 300g of fat burned for 300g of “dry weight” for a trip of ~11,000km. (bar-tailed godwits)
For a plane that’s roughly 80 tonnes of kerosene for 170 tonnes dry weight on a similar distance (787). Energy density of fat and kerosene are actually pretty close so you can just look at the kg of fuel burned per kg of payload for the trip. For a bird that’s 1kg of fuel per kg transported and for the plane that’s ~0.5kg per kg. So roughly twice as efficient.
So from a pure energy point of view it’d be more efficient to put all the migratory birds in a 787 than letting them fly on their own!
Also disgruntled is more or less unnecessary when combined with postdoc. Sort of goes without saying.
>EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?
This does not follow automatically. E.g. it is enormously easier to create an ICBM than to create something capable of intercepting an ICBM. Some technologies naturally benefit an attacker and some naturally benefit a defender.
and then what?
was the needle move at all?
The best good thing possible for humans who are all suffering from an extremely painful, incurable disease might just be ending that misery.
The worst bad thing possible in a perfect utopia might be a minor inconvenience comparatively.
One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.
I’m not sure it will ever be given its dues for its prescience. The whole rationality project was started with the explicit aim of upgrading participants’ reasoning abilities so that when AI came along for real, there would be people capable of thinking it through without making all the usual mistakes humans make when trying to reason about things.
In the discussions I read today, everyone involved from commenters up to CEOs are making all and exactly those mistakes, meaning it is in my opinion perhaps the greatest called shot of all time.
There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting.
and then transposed into an ai chat prompt to get the analytical momentum for some grand scheme that gets published to whatever extent ie a comment, blog post, or whatever textual content that then gets ingested as training data…llm rinse repeat. not sure where this is going. is anyone?
IOW:
> There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting.
True - for you and the dozens of folks like you, to paraphrase a meme.