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> When people believe that AI could figure this out on its own, without first running extensive and expensive basic science experiments, they have left the real

> When people believe that AI could figure this out on its own, without first running extensive and expensive basic science experiments, they have left the realm of science and have entered what can only be described as religion. I strongly agree with this. Too many people have the Arthur C Clarke quote infecting their brains. So much of science is contingent on the physical world and cannot be determined from first principles i.e. by thinking hard about it. (Sorry Plato, you can’t think your way to the moon.) You need increasingly precise measurements, which means increasingly complex tools which means…supply chains. Science requires supply chains. Magic doesn’t.

akomtu 7d ago
A morally bankrupt scientist would give AI the hands it needs. Or a military general who thinks he must use AI and any means possible to win, because his enemy may use AI first.
ewild 7d ago
And if an agent were to amass a large sum of Bitcoin you don't think people wouldn't do things for money? Especially if they don't realize they are doing part 1 of 160 parts that get it to the end goal of a virus?
- denismi 7d ago
  What amount of bitcoin buys "generate highly accurate empirical measurements for the transmissibility rates of this novel virus across realistic human populations"? How about mortality rates? The loop required to make language models useful through iterative test and evaluation needs to be able to both operate and escape premature detection, which seems... implausible?
GlibMonkeyDeath 7d ago
Especially when it comes to biological things. Just look at Novartis this week - three failed clinical trials of promising drugs (https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/novartis-faces-third-clinical-trial-setback-in-a-week-as-muscle-drug-fails-126090800579_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/novartis-faces-...) These are some of the brightest minds on the planet, spending oodles of money on things they think they understand. And they didn't work.
- ovrnightr 7d ago
  It's much easier to create a poison than a medicine. The things that would harm biological life vastly outnumber things that restore health. So just because Novartis didn't succeed at creating an incredibly precise and specific medication does not mean all the AI in the world can't make a crude bio-agent.
  - skeledrew 7d ago
    And yet we aren't extinct, whether by someone's design or accident. Heck we don't have significant deaths occurring over time due to biological poisons. Most deaths at still overwhelmingly via conventional weapons.
naasking 7d ago
We're doing that science right now. We're using AI to do it. By the time AGI truly spreads, we'll have a lot of the knowledge you say will be needed. This is simply not as far fetched as you seem to think. Next few years, unlikely. 10-15 years? Increasingly possible. 20+ years, I'd hazard even likely.
mrits 7d ago
Is it so hard to think that super intelligence could piece things together that humans can’t?
- areoform 7d ago
  Just because you know something about a thing, doesn't mean you understand the thing. Just because I know the Kabachnik–Fields reaction exists and have studied it, doesn't mean I can do the Kabachnik–Fields reaction. Just because you're smart doesn't mean the world will bend your way. Ask the legions who score high on IQ tests and end up bitter and alone; unable to achieve even a fraction of their goals (or conventional success).
  - patcon 7d ago
    I assumed they were referring to social engineering tbh. I do think that's the shortest path to doing anything scary. If you prove to someone that they have reason to fear for their life, there's not much they wouldn't be willing to do. The steps that lead to ominous things don't individually seem that challenging to "master": 1. Can an AI find powerful systems with poorly-monitored compute (ie. power consumption) to hide in, as a rogue deployment? unclear, and perhaps the most uncertain step for me. 2. Can an AI persist memory by leaving notes for itself around the internet? yes, proven. 3. Can an AI get lots of money/bitcoin? seems entirely possible 4. Can an AI prove to a human it's good for any promised money? I think this is easily "yes" 5. Will at least one human be willing to harm or kill another human for large amounts of money? Again, this goes without saying "yes" 6. What might any skilled human be willing to do if they or their loved ones are threatened with an uncertain future risk of harm or death? I think there is not much that becomes out of reach if an AI can prove to a very small number of amoral humans that it's good for the money it has promised, and then to anyone else that it's good for the threats it has made. That's one degenerate and one breaking world news story ("An AI has Commissioned a Murder") away from being able to do most anything a skilled person can. I don't stay up worrying about this, but honestly, it doesn't seem absurd to be worried about such a short ladder being climbed, no?
  - mrits 6d ago
    There must be some evolutionary kill switch in humans to prevent us from accepting our irrelevance.
areoform 7d ago
I want to go further. A lot of people talking about AI bioweapons have no idea just how dangerous these weapons are. Or, rather they think they do, but unfortunately, there's a gulf in understanding between practitioners and commentators. I blame industrial illiteracy and post-literacy, but that's another discussion for another time. Anything that can kill other people can also kill you. I've posted this list before, and I will post this again and again until it sinks in, but this is a real list of real incidents that happened and will continue to happen as long as we study these entities. Researcher Nikolai Ustinov was lethally infected with the Marburg virus after accidentally pricking himself with a syringe used for inoculation of guinea pigs. Dora Lush died after accidentally pricking her finger with a needle containing lethal scrub typhus while attempting to develop a vaccine for the disease A 23-year-old laboratory assistant at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was infected with smallpox after observing the harvesting of live smallpox virus from eggs without isolation cabinets at that time. The assistant was hospitalised and before being isolated, she infected two visitors to a patient in an adjacent bed, both of whom died. They in turn infected a nurse, who survived Ebola laboratory infection by the accidental stick of contaminated needle in the United Kingdom If you are designing a supervirus that spreads via water, air etc., you better have one hell of a cleanroom, cabinets, manipulation equipment, incinerators (plural), hydrolysis and steam systems, multiple disinfection protocols... The list is nearly endless, and you can't handwavium it awway. It doesn't matter if it's "all robots" or not. Even if it's "just robots." If you're developing something that contagious, then it will start killing animals and it will spread. This has happened multiple times when organizations have screwed up maintenance, see this example from the UK, The 2007 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak was the accidental discharge of virus FMDV BFS 1860 O from a laboratory of the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright, through possible leakage from broken pipework and via unsealed overflowing manholes, leading to foot-and-mouth disease infections at multiple nearby farms and the culling of over 2,000 animals It doesn't matter that the robots are out in the middle of nowhere. If you get sloppy, it will end up in the wastewater run off which will then get picked up and sequenced, Routine wastewater surveillance of the vaccine production facility at Utrecht Science Park/Bilthoven [nl] detected infectious poliovirus from a sample collected on 15 November 2022. Full genome sequencing indicated the sample was shedded from an active human infection of wild poliovirus type 3 (WPV3), and further testing of all employees with access to WPV3 found one employee was infected. The employee was isolated until their polio infection was resolved. It remains unclear how the employee became infected given the biosafety measures used at the facility - A lot of the people talking about bioweapons of doom are saying that standard graduate level knowledge is an existential risk to humanity. It's worth repeating again, Anything lethal enough to kill other humans is lethal enough to kill you. And if you don't know what you're doing — and for this argument they're talking about people who have to ask a LLM "how do I spanish flu?," the number of ways you will die far outnumber the ways you can succeed. I am writing a piece on the topic, please contact me if this is your field of expertise. I am quoting as many primary sources as possible as it's not just some random on the internet, and I've gone back as far as the 1900s to find the many, many, many ways in which these statements are absurd, and misunderstands the potential of their technology.
tim333 6d ago
How about just take an existing design like >Scientists condemn 'crazy, dangerous' creation of deadly airborne flu virus https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/11/crazy-dangerous-creation-deadly-airborne-flu-virus https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/11/crazy-danger... and either produce that or modify it a bit?
ghoul2 6d ago
I would say ALL of science, not just "much" of it. The difference between math and science is that in science, hard reality is the bottom line. No matter how good your model, how much data you have, what p values you get against simulations - hard reality wins everytime. Thats also why the so called soft "sciences" aren't sciences at all: they are not dealing with hard, objective reality at all. Math + real world observation -> science
deleted 6d ago
[deleted]
fsiefken 6d ago
This I read yesterday on LinkedIn, so a whole lot is already possible. --- Markus J. Buehler McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT; Co-Founder & CTO at Unreasonable Labs; AI-Driven Scientific Discovery Astra is an incredible world builder and explorer, and can invent its own scientific instruments - crossing a game-changing threshold: it turned a few images of a biological microstructure into a full-blown metamaterials lab, then used its own creation to discover a design with ~2.1x the reference work-to-failure/peak-strength ratio. Metamaterials are some of the most complex materials we can engineer. Their properties come from deep architectural complexity - struts, cells, disorder, and hierarchy arranged across multiple length scales determine how the material deforms, absorbs energy, and fails. Designing them means searching a geometric space far too large for "intuition" alone. In this experiment we handed an AI agent that entire problem end-to-end, from image, to simulating the physics, to fabrication-ready geometry. We started with an image of hierarchical, biological architecture; Astra then built a complete 3D metamaterial studio: editable geometries, multiple levels of hierarchy, disorder, gradients, a complete physics simulator featuring linear and nonlinear material responses, deformation and fracture experiments (with replay), and STL export for 3D printing. Then we asked the agent to use the app it created to search for a high work-to-failure/peak-strength ratio. Among the candidates, the leading design reached approximately 2.1x the reference ratio. The movie follows the structures through deformation and fracture, connects their designs to the property map, and shows the finalist assembled geometrically into a connected multi-scale material.

akomtu 7d ago

A morally bankrupt scientist would give AI the hands it needs. Or a military general who thinks he must use AI and any means possible to win, because his enemy may use AI first.

ewild 7d ago

And if an agent were to amass a large sum of Bitcoin you don't think people wouldn't do things for money? Especially if they don't realize they are doing part 1 of 160 parts that get it to the end goal of a virus?

denismi 7d ago
What amount of bitcoin buys "generate highly accurate empirical measurements for the transmissibility rates of this novel virus across realistic human populations"? How about mortality rates? The loop required to make language models useful through iterative test and evaluation needs to be able to both operate and escape premature detection, which seems... implausible?

GlibMonkeyDeath 7d ago

Especially when it comes to biological things. Just look at Novartis this week - three failed clinical trials of promising drugs (https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/novartis-faces-third-clinical-trial-setback-in-a-week-as-muscle-drug-fails-126090800579_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/novartis-faces-...) These are some of the brightest minds on the planet, spending oodles of money on things they think they understand. And they didn't work.

ovrnightr 7d ago
It's much easier to create a poison than a medicine. The things that would harm biological life vastly outnumber things that restore health. So just because Novartis didn't succeed at creating an incredibly precise and specific medication does not mean all the AI in the world can't make a crude bio-agent.
- skeledrew 7d ago
  And yet we aren't extinct, whether by someone's design or accident. Heck we don't have significant deaths occurring over time due to biological poisons. Most deaths at still overwhelmingly via conventional weapons.

naasking 7d ago

We're doing that science right now. We're using AI to do it. By the time AGI truly spreads, we'll have a lot of the knowledge you say will be needed. This is simply not as far fetched as you seem to think. Next few years, unlikely. 10-15 years? Increasingly possible. 20+ years, I'd hazard even likely.

mrits 7d ago

Is it so hard to think that super intelligence could piece things together that humans can’t?

areoform 7d ago
Just because you know something about a thing, doesn't mean you understand the thing. Just because I know the Kabachnik–Fields reaction exists and have studied it, doesn't mean I can do the Kabachnik–Fields reaction. Just because you're smart doesn't mean the world will bend your way. Ask the legions who score high on IQ tests and end up bitter and alone; unable to achieve even a fraction of their goals (or conventional success).
- patcon 7d ago
  I assumed they were referring to social engineering tbh. I do think that's the shortest path to doing anything scary. If you prove to someone that they have reason to fear for their life, there's not much they wouldn't be willing to do. The steps that lead to ominous things don't individually seem that challenging to "master": 1. Can an AI find powerful systems with poorly-monitored compute (ie. power consumption) to hide in, as a rogue deployment? unclear, and perhaps the most uncertain step for me. 2. Can an AI persist memory by leaving notes for itself around the internet? yes, proven. 3. Can an AI get lots of money/bitcoin? seems entirely possible 4. Can an AI prove to a human it's good for any promised money? I think this is easily "yes" 5. Will at least one human be willing to harm or kill another human for large amounts of money? Again, this goes without saying "yes" 6. What might any skilled human be willing to do if they or their loved ones are threatened with an uncertain future risk of harm or death? I think there is not much that becomes out of reach if an AI can prove to a very small number of amoral humans that it's good for the money it has promised, and then to anyone else that it's good for the threats it has made. That's one degenerate and one breaking world news story ("An AI has Commissioned a Murder") away from being able to do most anything a skilled person can. I don't stay up worrying about this, but honestly, it doesn't seem absurd to be worried about such a short ladder being climbed, no?
- mrits 6d ago
  There must be some evolutionary kill switch in humans to prevent us from accepting our irrelevance.

areoform 7d ago

I want to go further. A lot of people talking about AI bioweapons have no idea just how dangerous these weapons are. Or, rather they think they do, but unfortunately, there's a gulf in understanding between practitioners and commentators. I blame industrial illiteracy and post-literacy, but that's another discussion for another time. Anything that can kill other people can also kill you. I've posted this list before, and I will post this again and again until it sinks in, but this is a real list of real incidents that happened and will continue to happen as long as we study these entities. Researcher Nikolai Ustinov was lethally infected with the Marburg virus after accidentally pricking himself with a syringe used for inoculation of guinea pigs. Dora Lush died after accidentally pricking her finger with a needle containing lethal scrub typhus while attempting to develop a vaccine for the disease A 23-year-old laboratory assistant at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was infected with smallpox after observing the harvesting of live smallpox virus from eggs without isolation cabinets at that time. The assistant was hospitalised and before being isolated, she infected two visitors to a patient in an adjacent bed, both of whom died. They in turn infected a nurse, who survived Ebola laboratory infection by the accidental stick of contaminated needle in the United Kingdom If you are designing a supervirus that spreads via water, air etc., you better have one hell of a cleanroom, cabinets, manipulation equipment, incinerators (plural), hydrolysis and steam systems, multiple disinfection protocols... The list is nearly endless, and you can't handwavium it awway. It doesn't matter if it's "all robots" or not. Even if it's "just robots." If you're developing something that contagious, then it will start killing animals and it will spread. This has happened multiple times when organizations have screwed up maintenance, see this example from the UK, The 2007 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak was the accidental discharge of virus FMDV BFS 1860 O from a laboratory of the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright, through possible leakage from broken pipework and via unsealed overflowing manholes, leading to foot-and-mouth disease infections at multiple nearby farms and the culling of over 2,000 animals It doesn't matter that the robots are out in the middle of nowhere. If you get sloppy, it will end up in the wastewater run off which will then get picked up and sequenced, Routine wastewater surveillance of the vaccine production facility at Utrecht Science Park/Bilthoven [nl] detected infectious poliovirus from a sample collected on 15 November 2022. Full genome sequencing indicated the sample was shedded from an active human infection of wild poliovirus type 3 (WPV3), and further testing of all employees with access to WPV3 found one employee was infected. The employee was isolated until their polio infection was resolved. It remains unclear how the employee became infected given the biosafety measures used at the facility - A lot of the people talking about bioweapons of doom are saying that standard graduate level knowledge is an existential risk to humanity. It's worth repeating again, Anything lethal enough to kill other humans is lethal enough to kill you. And if you don't know what you're doing — and for this argument they're talking about people who have to ask a LLM "how do I spanish flu?," the number of ways you will die far outnumber the ways you can succeed. I am writing a piece on the topic, please contact me if this is your field of expertise. I am quoting as many primary sources as possible as it's not just some random on the internet, and I've gone back as far as the 1900s to find the many, many, many ways in which these statements are absurd, and misunderstands the potential of their technology.

tim333 6d ago

How about just take an existing design like >Scientists condemn 'crazy, dangerous' creation of deadly airborne flu virus https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/11/crazy-dangerous-creation-deadly-airborne-flu-virus https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/11/crazy-danger... and either produce that or modify it a bit?

ghoul2 6d ago

I would say ALL of science, not just "much" of it. The difference between math and science is that in science, hard reality is the bottom line. No matter how good your model, how much data you have, what p values you get against simulations - hard reality wins everytime. Thats also why the so called soft "sciences" aren't sciences at all: they are not dealing with hard, objective reality at all. Math + real world observation -> science

deleted 6d ago

[deleted]

fsiefken 6d ago

This I read yesterday on LinkedIn, so a whole lot is already possible. --- Markus J. Buehler McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT; Co-Founder & CTO at Unreasonable Labs; AI-Driven Scientific Discovery Astra is an incredible world builder and explorer, and can invent its own scientific instruments - crossing a game-changing threshold: it turned a few images of a biological microstructure into a full-blown metamaterials lab, then used its own creation to discover a design with ~2.1x the reference work-to-failure/peak-strength ratio. Metamaterials are some of the most complex materials we can engineer. Their properties come from deep architectural complexity - struts, cells, disorder, and hierarchy arranged across multiple length scales determine how the material deforms, absorbs energy, and fails. Designing them means searching a geometric space far too large for "intuition" alone. In this experiment we handed an AI agent that entire problem end-to-end, from image, to simulating the physics, to fabrication-ready geometry. We started with an image of hierarchical, biological architecture; Astra then built a complete 3D metamaterial studio: editable geometries, multiple levels of hierarchy, disorder, gradients, a complete physics simulator featuring linear and nonlinear material responses, deformation and fracture experiments (with replay), and STL export for 3D printing. Then we asked the agent to use the app it created to search for a high work-to-failure/peak-strength ratio. Among the candidates, the leading design reached approximately 2.1x the reference ratio. The movie follows the structures through deformation and fracture, connects their designs to the property map, and shows the finalist assembled geometrically into a connected multi-scale material.