Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
this thread appears to have attracted keyword-seeking bad posters. these fine posters have been escorted to the egress and may continue to enjoy their subthreads on other fediverse servers and not this one.
Takes like this are one of the many things I pull out to point out how naive and misguided most x-risk obsessive people are. And especially Mr. Altman.
Despite wide fears of synthetic gain of function attacks, as it turns out, it's actually really hard to create a new virus meaningfully stronger than the standard endemic ones that already exist. Many countries and labs have legitimately tried. Lots of papers and research. It's, really really hard to beat nature at the microbiological scale; Viruses have to not only be virulent, but it has to contend with extremely unpredictable intermediate environments. The current endemic viruses got there through many mutations and adaptations inside environments that they were already at least successful (and not in vitro). And in the end, what would be the point? Once a virulent virus breaks out, you have very little control. Either it works really well and backfires or, even far more likely, it doesn't do that much at all, but it does piss other nations off.
It's not impossible. But honestly, yeah, I don't comprehend x-riskers who obsess over this.
This sounds like a bad take, but for good reasons. I would like the people making AI to take really, really seriously the potential of synthetic viruses. It sounds like he's doing that (rather than working backwards from racism).
There's a good possibility that it was due to a lab leak, but it doesn't necessarily have to be synthetic. This was a lab taking too many liberties handling a virus that was already at risk of making the jump to humans, is it "lab-leak covid truther" to claim the inevitable under those circumstances would happen?
Is there any evidence he was fired for these beliefs? Using the deliberately vague phrase, "earlier this year" in November gives the impression of an author trying to either manufacture causation where none exists.
The only part of this article about Altman is the beginning. This author seems incredibly passionate about virology and is using recent news to draw attention to the author's points on the subject.
Everyone who is saying virus spread from bats to humans - you do realize there were people researching on bats in Wuhan, right? If it's from a bat, that doesn't automatically mean from a bat in nature.