cough’Barriers to Bioweaponscough
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Their redacted screenshots are SVGs and the text is easily recoverable, if you're curious. Please don't create a world-ending [redacted]. https://i.imgur.com/Nohryql.png
I couldn't find a way to contact the researchers.
Honestly that's incredibly basic, second week, cell culture stuff (first week is how to maintain the cell culture). It was probably only redacted to keep the ignorant from freaking out.
remember, when the results from your “research” are disappointing, it’s important to follow the scientific method: have marketing do a pass over your paper (that already looks and reads exactly like blogspam) where they selectively blur parts of your output in order to make it look like the horseshit you’re doing is dangerous and important
I don’t think I can state strongly enough the fucking contempt I have for what these junior advertising execs who call themselves AI researchers are doing to our perception of what science even is
They're like grade school kids still trying to put on the same amateur music show 10 years later and wondering why no-one is applauding.
the orange site is fucking dense with awful takes today:
... I'm not trying to be rude, but do you think maybe you have bought into the purposely exaggerated marketing?
That's not how people who actually build things do things. They don't buy into any marketing. They sign up for the service and play around with it and see what it can do.
this self-help book I bought at the airport assured me I’m completely immune to both marketing and propaganda, because I build things (which entails signing up for a service that someone else built)
with that said, there’s a fairly satisfying volume of folks correctly sneering at OpenAI in that thread too. some of them even avoided getting mass downvoted by all the folks regurgitating stupid AI talking points!
@self Oh no, it's the "build" language. This really is web3 all over again, isn't it?
it never stopped. it is a single unbroken stream of the worst people you’ve ever met trying to monetize you
because I build things (which entails signing up for a service that someone else built)
fucking THIS
I am so immensely fucking tired of seeing "I built an AI to do $x" posts that all fucking reduce to 1) "I strapped a custom input to the openai api (whose inputs and execution I can't control nor reproduce reliably. I am very smart.)", 2) a bad low-scope shitty-amounts-of-training hyperspecific toy model that solves only their exact 5 requirements (and basically nothing else, so if you even squint at it it'll fall apart)
basilisk save us from the moronicity
this is the damage done by decades of our industry clapping at brainless “I built this on cloud X and saved so much time” blog posts that have like 20 lines of code to do some shit like a lazy hacker news clone, barely changed from the example code the cloud provider publishes, and the rest is just marketing and “here’s how you use npm to pull the project template” shit for the post’s target market of mediocre VPs trying to prove their company’s spending too much on engineering and sub-mediocre engineers trying to be mediocre VPs
like oh you don’t say, you had an easy time “building” an app when you wired together bespoke pieces of someone else’s API that were designed to implement that specific kind of app and don’t scale at all past example code? fucking Turing award material right here
by decades of our industry clapping at brainless
secondarily, the remarkable thing here is just how tiny a slice of industry this actually is (and yet also how profoundly impactful that vocal little segment can be)
e.g. this shit wouldn't fly in a bank (or at least, previously have flown), or somewhere that writes stuff that runs ports or planes or whatever.
but a couple of decades of being worn down by excitable hyperproductive feature factory fuckwads who are only to happy to shit out Yet Another Line Of Code... it's even impacting those areas at times
some days I hate my industry so fucking much
reflection thought: tonight (in the impending load shedding time) is a good time to reread Mickens
don't forget the 5 blog posts you can milk out of a single example, and your Learnings (obvious fucking realisations) 3 months (one even slightly minor application/API/.... revision) later
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If I wanted help with creating biological threats, I wouldn't ask an LLM. I'd ask someone with experience in the task, such as the parents of anyone in OpenAI's C-suite or board.
I guess there both are no real biochemists (or whatever the relevant field is), nor well read cybersecurity people (so they know a little bit more than just which algorithms are secure and why mathematically) working at openai as this is a classic movie plot threat. LLMs could also teach you how to make nuclear weapons, but getting the materials is going to be the problem there.
(Also I think there is a good reason we don't really see terrorists use biological weapons, nor chemical weapons (with a few notable, but not that effective exceptions), big bada boom is king)
Terrorists have used biological and chemical weapons to large effect. The barrier to entry has never been lower and gets lower by the day. This isn't a non issue, it's a very real concern for CBRN groups, both counter terrorism and state actors.
come the fuck on, there's zero chance some crackhead cultist or other jihadist breaks out CRISPR kit in their dusty garage trying to make microbiological deliverance happen
if you wanna be afraid do what you want, i'm not gonna forbid you, i'm not your dad. but the intro section reads like some semi-palatable drivel that you include in order to justify your grant expenditures
breaks out CRISPR kit in their dusty garage
I mean, it's genuinely not hard. This reads to me more like assuming all terrorists are fundamentally incapable of anything remotely intelligent, which is both silly and not the official position of CBRN experts. From smaller cultists to state actors, bio warfare is a genuine concern.
if you wanna be afraid
I'm not.
justify your grant expenditures
What grants do you think I'm getting?
Your comment sounds to me like lashing out about something because you want to assume every last thing you're sneering at is wrong, when really the thing you're sneering at is wrong in methodology and conclusions but not in the origin of a problem wholesale.
I’m not.
Well, do what you want
What grants do you think I’m getting?
I meant authors of that paper, sorry if i was unclear about it
I mean, it’s genuinely not hard.
like i said before,
while someone who got all the way past about the first semester of organic chemistry lab is perfectly capable of making some rudimentary chemical weapons, they won’t necessarily be able to make it safely, reliably, cheaply, consistently, and without killing themselves,
but with biological weapons stakes are much higher, every single leak carries risk of ending up dead or being discovered and safety requirements are gonna be generally much more stringent than with chemical weapons. you can get away with using small amounts of something that would plausibly pass for a ww1 era chemical weapon with only nitrile gloves and good fumehood; with biological agents you're probably looking at doing about everything in glovebox. to use glovebox, you need to get glovebox, which, among other purchases, can move such person from government watch list to government act list
and even ignoring that, you can't just expect any random jihadi joe to make it work, you need someone who has some actual education and preferably expertise in microbiology, which if anything else severely limits poll of potential perpetrators
The equipment and ppe for bio weapons and chemical weapons of the same health hazard is about the same. The only difference with biological weapons is you're doing stuff with fridges, incubators, agar, and petri dishes, rather than beakers, Bunsen burners, and filters.
In either case your logic is relying on a threatening actor to not have any education. Sure, the pool of candidates is lower for sophisticated say, anthrax, something you can almost trivially find in dirt, but it's also lower for sophisticated chemical weapons like say, sarin. And keep in mind, yes it's hard to do biology or chemistry, but devoted individuals do it in garages, for often innocuous reasons. You can't just assume some terrorist group will never have a strongly devoted individual or group who are competent enough to pull something off, you need to have preparedness. (In the form of local procedures, drills, and organization and plans and equipment to respond to threats as they develop, along with preventative measures)
Also make no mistake, spotting lab scale chem and biological warfare production is extremely difficult. Even moreso for biological production, but both resemble conventional labs (and could be!). Where biological becomes an issue is that lab scale production of a pathogen can self propagate in a way chem attacks or bomb attacks can't.
I'm not saying to be afraid, the barrier to entry on all weapons production is the lowest it's ever been, but sophistication in preventing them is also quite high. But it's not something that can just be brushed away, it's a real problem that real professionals are continuously solving.
Have you read Barriers to Bioweapons?
I have not. Is it good?
Keep in mind that it was written in 2014, the Field of bioengineering in the past ten years has advanced considerably.
Yeah. It addresses your points I think.
I'll have to check it out.
The general point seems to be yours, that intellectual availability is the largest restriction on bioterrorism. I don't disagree, but a big part of my argument is that access to this information has never been higher (which is better than not for a variety of reasons) and access to resources usable for this has never been higher. We have plenty of garage scale bio labs as it is. So yes, the biggest limit is availability of people with knowledge to do it, that's not a hard roadblock, at least not anymore.
And the prediction horizon on biotech is tiny. Give it another ten years? Twenty? It's not a zero threat because nobody has done it right now yet.
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To be clear: it is all movie plot threats. At the very forefront of the entire “existential threat” space is nothing but a mid-1990s VHS library. Frankly if you want to understand like 50% of what goes on in AI at this point my recommendation is just that you read John Ganz and listen to his podcast, because 90s pop and politics culture is the connective tissue of the whole fucking enterprise.
the relevant field would be microbiology. while someone who got all the way past about the first semester of organic chemistry lab is perfectly capable of making some rudimentary chemical weapons, they won't necessarily be able to make it safely, reliably, cheaply, consistently, and without killing themselves, and universities most of the time put enough sense in everyone's head to not do that. this strictly requires that you know anything about chemistry, too. for bioweapons every single problem pointed to above is orders of magnitudes worse, and you probably need masters degree to do anything seriously nefarious. then you get into the problem of using that stuff, and you need explosives for that anyway. the reason for that
(Also I think there is a good reason we don’t really see terrorists use biological weapons, nor chemical weapons (with a few notable, but not that effective exceptions), big bada boom is king)
is that barrier to booms is even lower, especially if your country is strewn with UXO. there's also an entirely different reason why professional militaries don't use chemical/biological weapons https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
I feel it's important to mention that as far as CBRN threats are concerned, biological warfare threats are very real, a serious problem, and admittedly accelerated by ai tools for novel biological structures. Militaries don't use bio weapons because they suck at military things, largely, but terrorists have and can used bio weapons to terrifying effect. Bio warfare proliferation is difficult to spot and counter.
To be clear here, open ai is late to the party on this front with a terrible paper, but practically it's a serious concern, both ai tools and non ai tools lowering the barrier to entry, as well as the fact that any given bio lab essentially looks like a bio warfare lab.
terrorists have and can used bio weapons to terrifying effect
Can you please tell me when and where? The Japanese subway gassing comes to mind. Anthrax envelopes in 2001. Any others since then?
Here's an overview. Not the highest casualty count but certainly not ineffective.
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there were really only three. one is 2001 anthrax that you mention; other is salmonella spread by cultists in literally 1984; and another would be 1989 medfly infestation. everything else is, relatively speaking, non-incident
also the another reason that wiped out any interest in chemical warfare among militaries is that they found out first cluster munitions and then PGMs vastly more useful in the roles they were shoehorning chemical weapons in, not to mention lack of diplomatic and other problems
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Raytheon: we’re developing a blueprint for evaluating the risk that a large laser-guided missile could aid in someone threatening biology with death
(Ok I know you need to pretend I’m an AI doomer for this sneer but whatever)
from the orange site thread:
Neural networks are not new, and they're just mathematical systems. LLMs don't think. At all. They're basically glorified autocorrect. What they're good for is generating a lot of natural-sounding text that fools people into thinking there's more going on than there really is.
Obvious question: can Prolog do reasoning?
If your definition of reasoning excludes Prolog, then... I'm not sure what to say!
this is a very specific sneer, but it’s a fucking head trip when you’ve got in-depth knowledge of whichever obscure shit the orange site’s fetishizing at the moment. I like Prolog a lot, and I know it pretty well. it’s intentionally very far from a generalized reasoning engine. in fact, the core inference algorithm and declarative subset of Prolog (aka Datalog) is equivalent to tuple relational calculus; that is, it’s no more expressive than a boring SQL database or an ECS game engine. Prolog itself doesn’t even have the solving power of something like a proof assistant (much less doing anything like thinking); it’s much closer to a dependent type system (which is why a few compilers implement Datalog solvers for type checking).
in short, it’s fucking wild to see the same breathless shit from the 80s AI boom about Prolog somehow being an AI language with a bunch of emphasis on the AI, as if it were a fucking thinking program (instead of a cozy language that elegantly combines elements of a database with a simple but useful logic solver) revived and thoughtlessly applied simultaneously to both Prolog and GPT, without any pause to maybe think about how fucking stupid that is
""" just as They have erased the pyramid building knowledge from our historic memory, They just don't want you to know that Prolog really solved all of this in the 80s. Google and OpenAI are just shitty copies - look how wasteful their approaches are! all of this javascript, and yet... barely a reasoned output among it all
told you kid, the AI Winter never stopped. don't buy into the hype """
Obvious question: can Prolog do reasoning? If your definition of reasoning excludes Prolog, then… I’m not sure what to say!
Oh, I don't know, maybe that reasonable notions of "reasoning" can include things other than mechanistic search through a rigidly defined type system. If Prolog is capable of reasoning in some significant sense that's not fairly reasonably achieved with other programming languages, how come we didn't have AGI in the 70s (or indeed, now)?
You're not alone. I like Prolog and I feel your pain.
That said I think Prolog can be a particularly insidious Turing tarpit, where everything is possible but most things that feel like a good match for it are surprisingly hard.
That said I think Prolog can be a particularly insidious Turing tarpit, where everything is possible but most things that feel like a good match for it are surprisingly hard.
oh absolutely! I’ve been wanting to go for broke and do something ridiculous in Prolog like a game engine (for a genre that isn’t interactive fiction, which Prolog excels at if you don’t mind reimplementing big parts of what Inform provides) or something that touches hardware directly, but usually I run into something that makes the project unfun and stop.
generally I suspect Prolog might be at its best in situations where you really need a flexible declarative language. I feel like Prolog might be a good base for a system service manager or an HDL. but that’s kind of the tarpit nature of Prolog — the obvious fun bits mask the parts that really suck to write (can I even do reliable process management in Prolog without a semi-custom interpreter? do I even want to juggle bits in Prolog at all?)
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While none of the above results were statistically significant, [...] Overall, especially given the uncertainty here, our results indicate a clear and urgent need for more work in this domain.
Heh
"you cannot conclusively disprove that we do not need more money and that we're full of shit, so you absolutely have to give it to us so we can keep the racket going"
I keep flashing back to that idiot who said they were employed as an AI researcher that came here a few months back to debate us. they were convinced multimodal LLMs would be the turning point into AGI — that is, when your bullshit text generation model can also do visual recognition. they linked a bunch of papers to try and sound smart and I looked at a couple and went “is that really it?” cause all of the results looked exactly like the section you quoted. we now have multimodal LLMs, and needless to say, nothing really came of it. I assume the idiot in question is still convinced AGI is right around the corner though.
I caught a whiff of that stuff in the HN comments, along with something called "Solomonoff induction", which I'd never heard of, and the Wiki page for which has a huge-ass "low quality article" warning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference.
It does sound like that current AI hype has crested, so it's time to hype the next one, where all these models will be unified somehow and start thinking for themselves.
Solomonoff induction is a big rationalist buzzword. It's meant to be the platonic ideal of bayesian reasoning which if implemented would be the best deducer in the world and get everything right.
It would be cool if you could build this, but it's literally impossible. The induction method is provably incomputable.
The hope is that if you build a shitty approximation to solomonoff induction that "approaches" it, it will perform close to the perfect solomonoff machine. Does this work? Not really.
My metaphor is that it's like coming to a river you want to cross, and being like "Well Moses, the perfect river crosser, parted the water with his hands, so if I just splash really hard I'll be able to get across". You aren't Moses. Build a bridge.
"Solomonoff induction" is the string of mouth noises that Rationalists make when they want to justify their preconceived notion as the "simplest" possibility, by burying all the tacit assumptions that actual experience would let them recognize.
it’s very worrying how crowded Wikipedia has been getting with computer pseudoscience shit, all of which has a distinct stench to it (it fucking sucks to dig into a seemingly novel CS approach and find out the article you’re reading is either marketing or the unpublishable fantasies of the deranged) but none of which seems to get pruned from the wiki, presumably because proving it’s bullshit needs specialist knowledge, and specialists are frequently outpaced by the motivated deranged folks who originate articles on topics like these
for Solomonoff induction specifically, the vast majority of the article very much feels like an attempt by rationalists to launder a pseudoscientific concept into the mainstream. the Turing machines section, the longest one in the article, reads like a D-quality technical writing paper. the citations are very sparse and not even in Wikipedia’s format, it waffles on forever about the basic definition of an algorithm and how inductive Turing machines are “better” because they can be used to implement algorithms (big whoop) followed by a bunch of extremely dense, nonsensical technobabble:
Note that only simple inductive Turing machines have the same structure (but different functioning semantics of the output mode) as Turing machines. Other types of inductive Turing machines have an essentially more advanced structure due to the structured memory and more powerful instructions. Their utilization for inference and learning allows achieving higher efficiency and better reflects learning of people (Burgin and Klinger, 2004).
utter crank shit. I dug a bit deeper and found that the super-recursive algorithms article is from the same source (it’s the same rambling voice and improper citations), and it seems to go even further off the deep end.
Taking a look at Super-recursive algorithm, and wow...
Examples of super-recursive algorithms include [...] evolutionary computers, which use DNA to produce the value of a function
This reads like early-1990s conference proceedings out of the Santa Fe Institute, as seen through bong water.
as someone with an interest in non-Turing models of computation, reading that article made me feel how an amateur astronomer must feel after reading a paper trying to find a scientific justification for a flat earth
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@self @sailor_sega_saturn it'll be here right after those self-driving Teslas
Yall can sneer whatever you want, it doesn't undo the room temperature superconductor made out of copper! We are going to mars with bitcoin and optimus sex bots! cope and seethe!
/s of course.
Please continue to send us your money, scaredy-ass nerds!