[ExI] Predictive Model of Death

[Tomaz Kristan]

YES. This combination of a moderate AI and some terrorist mindset of a
human is a neglected aspect of "AI friendliness" and a bit closer to an
actual realization.

Still, I don't think everybody would die. 99% of all people on Earth, at
the most.

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 10:22 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Years ago on this list we discussed the possibility that the Unfriendly AI
> might solve the protein folding problem and hire a contract lab to
> unknowingly generate the nanotech doomsday weapon. Those discussions were a
> bit nebulous, since we didn't know how difficult it would be to solve the
> protein folding problem and how it would fit on the scale of AI difficulty.
> Since last year we have a bit of clarity- the protein folding problem was
> solved by a AIphaFold, and perhaps unsurprisingly this AI is orders of
> magnitude too dumb to be Unfriendly.
>
> Despite its lack of agency, AlphaFold is approaching the level where it
> could be acutely dangerous to all of us. It will probably take only a few
> years before AlphaFold becomes powerful enough to create predictive models
> of large molecular assemblies, up to and including human cells.
>
> An easy to use molecular-scale predictive model of human cells would be an
> immensely powerful tool for biomedical research and engineering. The kind
> of work that today takes a small army of postdocs toiling for years in a
> well-equipped lab and spending millions of dollars could be doable by a
> grad student in a weekend.
>
> If that grad student had a grudge against the world and a death wish, here
> is how he could proceed to kill everybody:
>
> 1. Show up at work Saturday morning, when nobody is going to bug you about
> the stuff you're supposed to do. Use the AI to generate the sequences of a
> few thousand completely new deadly viruses. You could get creative and make
> a wide range of new viruses, mixing and matching diverse paths of
> infection, varying incubation periods, completely re-engineering every
> single protein including the replicases (so existing antivirals would be
> useless), making completely new capsid proteins to eliminate
> cross-reactivity with existing viruses, use various reservoirs in the body
> to assure long-term infection and prolonged infectivity (like HIV and
> herpes) but with a timed switch to an acute attack phase (to allow spread
> through asymptomatic individuals over long periods of time), use non-human
> vectors of infection (insects, like the dengue virus), non-human reservoirs
> including pets, farm animals and wildlife)... the possibilities are myriad.
> With powerful-enough software you might have it done by Saturday evening.
>
> 2. Synthesize the sequences in vitro. A few hours in a high-throughput
> industrial scale lab of the future might be enough and also fully
> automated, yielding a thousand samples of DNA in a few 384-well
> microplates. Pick up Sunday morning. No need to ask anybody for help.
>
> 3. Add the DNA to plates with a cell-free transcription and translation
> extract - an hour or less in a high-throughput pipetting robot. The
> cell-free extract would synthesize the RNA to control translation and to
> make the proteins needed to package the DNA. Most of the samples should
> generate infectious virions, although the titers would be low. Should be
> done by early Sunday afternoon.
>
> 4. Invert the plates and slam down in a shallow tray with PBS to pool the
> samples. 5 minutes.
>
> 5. Inhale, drink, inject the pooled viruses on Sunday evening.
>
> 6. Go home, sleep, wake up Monday. By then some of the viruses might
> already be present in your secretions.
>
> 7. Start traveling in the metro, all day long, changing lines.
>
> 8. Take a flight somewhere, keep riding the metro, preferably in a crowded
> large city on another continent. Sneeze and cough often, even if you don't
> need to, or talk a lot on the phone, to get more virus spread.
>
> 9. Keep repeating steps 7 and 8 until you drop dead, in the secure
> knowledge you killed everybody.
>
> If you were willing to spend more time making the viruses, you could do
> the wet part of the job in a home lab with handheld pipettes, and literally
> no other equipment, a long as you had access to the cell modeling software
> and the ability to order DNA synthesized and to order the cell-free
> extracts from a catalog.
>
> These steps are so obvious I don't think I am doing anything dangerous by
> outlining them. Of course, we don't have the predictive model of human
> cells yet, so the scenario is still fiction... but eventually it will be
> possible, maybe years before the AI singularity.
>
> Scary stuff.
>
> Rafal
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