AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

colingauvin

No, a human could do (and have, many many many times, see like half of molecular biology) this as well. If anything this will help with vaccine development. Edit: I'm a PhD biochemist that has done a fair bit of virus modification. Love the downvotes. Never change HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

wild_pointer

Betteridge's law strikes again

timr

The design was never the hard part. You still have to make the thing. Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.

acjohnson55

Something I've been worried about for years is the proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people, in potentially irreversible ways. Combined with automation, this is a recipe for disaster. We're clearly lacking in the ability to regulate and govern ourselves, and real world market forces (as opposed to the hypothetical free market) encourage reckless aggressiveness at the level of companies and countries. Although, I must admit, as a doomer, I'm pleasantly surprised things aren't already worse than they are.

hoppp

The regulation at the DNA Printer level works I think, as long as nobody invents a good at home DNA printer, but if they do that there is no need for custom viruses, somebody can take an existing one that is known to be deadly and just print it.

mehraban

Yes, we should, but even here distribution is an serious issue.

clickety_clack

Were we safer when the viruses were object oriented?

ModernMech

Doubly because they’ll also use AI to manage the AI pandemic response.

SubiculumCode

AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.

evilelectron

Get ready for the next adventure in the saga of 12 Monkeys, with AI starts like Bruce Wills, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer, coming to a bio lab around you. The experience of a life time one you can't miss, it is in the air.

Alive-in-2025

I think it's certain that people will try recreating old viruses or making alternatives to them. It will be too easy. Make 5 variants of small pox, 5 variants of sars. Release them at once all around the world to make it hard to fight. It will be too easy for some crazy angry people to do this. I just hope that our defenses and ability to sequence them and respond.

rich_sasha

Don’t we already have plenty of deadly viruses around? Why would you design a virus when rabies, anthrax and Ebola, for starters, exist in the wild?

PeterStuer

It is complicated, because the real question is about who gets to design the virusses, and who gets to design the antidotes.

alpineidyll3

This happened a full year ago. A) you should immediately discount the expertise of people just learning this now B) a designed pathogen will kill a person this century, full stop, no way to prevent that. The people who invented fission were not so stupid they imagined the bomb wouldn't occur, indeed they assumed it would. I have no idea what became of the wisdom of those people. C) just like nuclear technology that doesn't mean a prohibition is called for. Intelligence is. What we _can_ do is invest in detection, rapid response technology (vaccines etc), and attempt to mitigate and stratify the possibilities of this happening in the worse ways. Today's knee jerk prohibitions, and fanciful notions of prohibition working are not facilitating those changes.

ChrisArchitect

Related: AI Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200213 Artificial Intelligence used to design new viruses https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206642