people who spout the trite “everything will be better at some nondescript future point in time” are essentially screaming “the ends justify the means and screw everyone else, i’m going to get my bag / be ok”.
Pre vaccination smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people just in the twentieth century [0], the knowledge that allowed for the creation of just that vaccine is worth hundreds trillions of dollars in humans lives, let alone all of `the knowledge and experiences those people were involved in.
The knowledge that created the Haber-Bosch process [1] helps to sustain the majority of the world's populous, add another five hundred trillion dollars for that just to start with.
The creation of the printing press and all written information that allowed it to be built provided dissemination of knowledge beyond the ultra wealthy and is worth a non-finite amount of money.
LLM's are cool math, but they are less than a rounding error in comparison to even the tiniest sliver of human knowledge and technological output.
I’m thinking asking the same lines, but also looking into research / lab chemist so I can hang out with my best friend. If im going to change careers so drastically, I might as well enjoy the company.
There are already scores of people capable of building biological weapons or doing GOF work which ends up being essentially the same thing. There’s no need for an LLM, just a phd in virology, a decent lab, and a handful of grad students. [0]
All of which, rogue actors have easy access to and could have accomplished for a few millions dollars anytime in the last decade.
And yet, we aren’t drowning in our own blood while our organs liquify, mainly because building and releasing such a pathogen isn’t something people want to do as it’s pure and utter insanity. For those who are inclined to do so, they would do it regardless of whether they had an llm or not because they are, at the end of the day, zealots.
> There’s no need for an LLM, just a phd in virology, a decent lab, and a handful of grad students.
You are missing the forest for the trees. The existing virologist PhDs and the GoF labs are a scarce resource. The model makes the same scarce knowledge accessible to many more malicious actors.
We have somewhere between 0% < X < 100% probability that covid-19 (remember that?) was an accidental lab leak by credentialed virologists not making use of AI in the post-2022 sense.
If I don't trust the credentialed virologists without AI based on perceived precedent, I'm certainly not going to trust them with AI to accelerate their their unabated workstreams.
Note: per my HN profile, I am an advisor for BiosafetyNow.
People in similar cultures and societies tend to roughly align, but its still leaky within a society and can be very misaligned across different societies.
The problem of alignment with AI is that there's potentially a power imbalance.
When a small number of people in a society are misaligned they can be dealt with. Say there's a murder for example, and that's not okay in their culture, those around may banish them, imprison them, etc.
That doesn't work with something that can cause drastically more damage than a single human can. If a misaligned AI hacks NORAD and launches our nukes, it only took one misalignment issue and there's no dealing with that after the fact.
We are a franchisor the owns 2 concepts, both of which are thrift stores aimed at different demographics. We write all of our software in-house and its actually a surprisingly "fun" context.
The business had pretty questionable (read: bad) software for a long time, then came under new management a few years ago. I joined just under two years ago and since then we've been modernizing the code with an eye to move it off of the in-store servers its running on currently and into the cloud. That is complicated by the fact that the franchisees are not used to certain things, like really needing to have reliable internet with a failover, so we've had to (or had the opportunity) do some serious hardening on the in-store servers and how we deploy software to them. We've switched them all to immutable OSes, added a bunch of telemetry, and added some new services that are slowly eating the old ones' responsibilities and will be much easier to move to the cloud.
Also the winters are ok but not as nice as they used to be. I grew up here so I remember when they were extremely snowy and I miss that, now they're fairly grey and mild.
people who spout the trite “everything will be better at some nondescript future point in time” are essentially screaming “the ends justify the means and screw everyone else, i’m going to get my bag / be ok”.
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