I am honestly still confused about this limitation. I can understand cybersecurity, because mass "hacking" can be automated and Claude itself can help you do it, but biology...? Is it that easy to manufacture and distribute viruses and whatnot?
You can order genes online, and some say you can assemble using stuff cobbled together in a home lab rather easily. For the last 20 years, I've personally felt that bio-terrorism is the highest possible risk, well above nuclear, or chemical warfare. But it does take training, expertise, or, it did.
It’s like saying you sell ammonium nitrate and fuel oil online and then saying it’s too risky to let people have computers in case they use them to make ANFO. They can only make bioweapons because you’re selling them bioweapon components! They can’t make genes at home!
Considering there are many high-school competitions in genetic editing, some listed at [0] as well as a whole biohacker culture, and labs providing gene sequencing as a service e.g., [1,2], we can reasonably assume it is not beyond the reach of some garage lab to accidentally or deliberately spread a deadly pathogen if it can find the right sequence.
So, yes, having an unconstrained frontier AI doing the searching and analysis to find the right (i.e., wrong and deadly) sequence would massively increase the odds some garage biohacker or small aggrieved nation-state starting the next pandemic.
Yeah, since the ACA my coverage has remained the same while my costs have risen 10x; I'm in my 30s and my medical insurance costs 3x what my mortgage costs, and I still have $$$$ sized bills after a round of strep throat.
I would really like to just be able to get a true catastrophic policy which would cover unlikely risks such as cancer -- and then go on a cash basis for common meds and treatments. The ACA made this kind of insurance illegal, so my choice is to leave my family uninsured -- or let insurance soak up the money I might have saved for their college education.
Your blame is misplaced. Costs are increasing in spite of the ACA, not because of it. Pre-ACA your family insurance policy was likely worse in some key ways: it probably excluded coverage pre-existing conditions and had a lifetime maximum coverage limit.
But then the blame might be correctly placed? If he had no pre-existing conditions and was on a no-existing conditions plan, that plan might have saved him a lot of money.
Imagine car insurance regulations changing in such a way to force underwriters to blanket-assume everyone has had a couple speeding tickets this year. I understand why we do it. We are ok with speeders paying more for insurance, and not ok with someone born with diabetes forced to pay more for health insurance. But it is the end result in any case.
George Bird Grinnell, the "Father of Glacier National Park", made a final visit to his namesake Grinnell glacier in 1926 and then wrote in his diary [1]:
>"the glacier is melting very fast and the amount of water coming from it is great. All these glaciers are receding rapidly and after a time will disappear."
It's important to also note, as explained in the article:
>"Grinnell was witnessing the glacier react to a relatively natural change in the climate. The Little Ice Age, which was a cold period when the park’s current glaciers were at their largest, ended in the late 1800s as the climate started warming. The melting of the park’s glaciers in the late 1800s, was a mostly natural reaction to the end of the Little Ice Age."
The quote, without context, implied to me that he had an understanding of anthropogenic climate change a century ago. While there were people[1] at that time who did theorize this was happening, I don't think that's what Grinnell was implying in his diary.
It's also the case that the amount of melting then pales in comparison to the amount occurring today - so I'm not attempting to say that what we see today may be the continuing of a natural climate fluctuation.
I was at Glacier Bay National Park just last week (https://photos.prakhar.me/alaska) and it was just depressing to hear from the park rangers on how far the glaciers have receded. Really grateful to have been able to witness them in person but it is sad to see what we've done to this planet.
I don't know you but I doubt you're largely responsible for the climate crisis. What I mean is that the "we" is a unsteerable concept. As such, I don't consider myself responsible. I do as much as my limited power lets me (also i guess I could resort myself to more potent ways of political expression). People that have power are responsible.
reply