Yapay zeka özellikli biyolojik silahların hayaleti, biyoteknoloji için bir uyandırma çağrısıdır

In recent weeks, leaders of some of the biggest AI companies have warned that the very tech they are developing is dangerous. Last weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that AI carries serious risk and that progress should be slowed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X : “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.”

Those posts came a few days after the AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was leaving a role at Anthropic, charging that neither it nor OpenAI (where he had also worked) was acting responsibly. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he posted on X . Another Anthropic employee, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed with him. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” he responded on X . “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

One of the ways they fear AI might end us all is by somehow aiding the design, creation, and release of some kind of bioweapon. Let’s take a closer look at why.

A bioweapon might be a highly lethal virus that targets people according to their genes. It could be a fungus that wipes out a crop and causes food insecurity. Perhaps it would be a tasteless, odorless toxin that could be slipped into a region’s water supply, undetected.

The concern is that AI tools can be used to help generate agents like these.

In 2022, researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals found that it was remarkably easy to do so using an AI “molecule generator” they’d developed to find potential drugs for human disease. In less than six hours, the model generated 40,000 molecules with the potential to serve as chemical warfare agents. Some of them were designed to be even more toxic than known nerve agents. “Without being overly alarmist, this should serve as a wake-up call for our colleagues in the ‘AI in drug discovery’ community,” the authors wrote at the time .

It was a wake-up call for David Magnus, a professor of medicine and biomedical ethics at Stanford University, even though he had been assessing the risks associated with the misuse of medical science and biotechnology since the late 1990s. “That was very scary to me,” he says. “Of course, everything since then has just sort of blown up.”

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