I'm a native speaker and I agree. English spelling carries a lot of history and context along with it, which would be lost in any spelling standardization. That richness is a good thing. A little complexity or inconsistency is good. It reflects that spelling is a fundementally imperfect encoding of a living language whose true form is the spoken word. And if you truly grapple with the tremendous diversity of spoken English, it is obvious that any One True Phonetic Orthography is impossible.

Fundamentally I don't think "tool" is the right word for whatever generative AI is. Tools are normally designed with intention for a specific purpose, but AI systems are trained or grown.

To use an analogy, you can use a goat as a lawnmower - it'll keep the grass down for you. You could maybe even train it so it keeps it a specific length, but it's a goat - there's always a chance it will jump the fence or headbutt you or something else. It's an animal, not a tool. You can use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make it a tool.

Yes AI is arguably still software, but we have never seen programs with anything close to this level of flexibility and adaptability in software.

As another analogy, there's nothing special about neurons- their characteristics are broadly known and researchers have been able to simulate small numbers of them in computer models. However, when you have enough of them in the right structure, complex behaviours are possible which are never exhibited at the lower levels. There's nothing majorly different between the neurons in brains of a chimp and a human, but the capabilities and meta-capabilities are wildly different.

I think we see a similar step-change with generative AI systems.

People say this, and then the scenarios they come up with are boring and uninteresting. 80% of the scenarios in this thread are "AI hacks something", as if hacking didn't exist before agents, and the remaining 20% are mostly made up of other things humans are already trying to do at scale.

Why am I supposed to believe that a virus created in a virology lab with AI assistance is uniquely more dangerous than a virus created in a virology lab without AI assistance?

> Why am I supposed to believe that a virus created in a virology lab with AI assistance is uniquely more dangerous than a virus created in a virology lab without AI assistance?

You're not.*

The difference is how likely this is to be done, not how dangerous it might be if it was done.

And this isn't likelihood in a 0-100% sense, but in a Poisson distribution sense, i.e. mean time between incidents.

Remember: these AI minds aren't that good with the physical world, and have nevertheless been repeatedly connected to robots, and now some of the AI labs are showing off their actual wet labs. Accidents are absolutely a possibility, and I don't think it's low given the previous behaviour of Silicon Valley startups.

* OK, some people care that AI is getting more capable at genetics just like it's been in maths and programming, but short term, before AI solves genetics so hard it can make an STD that makes the infected uncontrollably horny and then ossifies our bodies or something, it can obviously just copy any of the many DNA or RNA sequences we've already got on record.

Physical labs and experiments will always have physical bottlenecks, so I really don't see how AI is a transformative element here. What is it about AI that will be so transformative to the fundemental economics of this space that it will lead to several orders of magnitude more experimentation? If the problem is an expansion of wild west wet lab experimentation, why isn't ~that~ the focus of safety?

Who is going to profit from making an super STD anyway? How would regulating AI change their incentive structure?

> Physical labs and experiments will always have physical bottlenecks, so I really don't see how AI is a transformative element here.

AI is all about automation, removing bottlenecks. One of the easier to see bottlenecks is that it answers exam questions, which means the set of people who were previously excluded by the bottleneck of "can't answer exam questions" is now available for problems one step harder than before.

Note: This does not mean those people are now competent on harder problems, and AI is very different to humans in the kinds of error it makes, so AI letting some humans skip the "passing exams" bottleneck does not mean those cheating humans are going to automatically know how to avoid the kinds of dangerous error that a human who did the work to pass an exam would automatically pick up.

> What is it about AI that will be so transformative to the fundemental economics of this space that it will lead to several orders of magnitude more experimentation?

Other than all the things that allowed AlphaFold, or other forms of computational chemistry, and that lab equipment is increasingly computer controlled, and that LLMs can efficiently perform literature reviews, and that "research taste" is one of the new benchmarks for AI improvements now that we've saturated our ability to sensibly compare them on so many other things, and that they're really really cheap?

("Other than that, what have the Romans done for us?")

> If the problem is an expansion of wild west wet lab experimentation, why isn't ~that~ the focus of safety?

Two things: One, lab safety was already a focus of safety. Two, AI is a general purpose technology, biolab issues are simply one concrete example of a thing that it can mess up dangerously.

> Who is going to profit from making an super STD anyway? How would regulating AI change their incentive structure?

Two very separate questions.

First, one is a category error: consider that one could equally well ask "Who is going to profit from hacking into HuggingFace just to steal some puzzles?", to which the answer is "Nobody. Profit was not a direct motivation of the AI itself: an AI did this after being given an impossible test question, which the AI solved by hacking one system, then incorrectly reaching the conclusion it needed to break into a totally unrelated system to cover up that it had cheated".

Second: regulations, all regulations in all situations, are nothing but an incentive structure. That's their sole purpose, to change the incentives of a person, be that person a legal person or a natural person.

"Free communication" is specifically held up as a threat to democracy by current leaders in quite a few states. For instance, Macron and Merz in France and Germany have both recently explictly comdemned free communication, that isn't filtered and gatekept by some "common framework" or government agency, as a threat to democracy. Probably because this communication is producing social movements in these countries that the state cannot control.

And if this isn't US-centric enough for you, the previous US administration created a "Disinformation Governance Board" specifically to address the threats that they felt free communication among the people was posing to democracy, taking action to pressure corporate actors to censor disfavored popular speech in attempt to circumvent first amendment protections. At least the current administration isn't really pretending that attacking free speech is protecting democracy somehow.