Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’

  • @NounsAndWordsEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    This sounds like a bad take, but for good reasons. I would like the people making AI to take really, really seriously the potential of synthetic viruses. It sounds like he’s doing that (rather than working backwards from racism).

    • @[email protected]English
      17•1 year ago

      As often is the case here on awful systems, both sides are bad. Matt Ridley is a climate change denying shouty british aristocrat person all mad that greenpeace is not admitting there is a possibility windmills might be affecting whales (71 dead ones in the uk last year, no idea about the average of dead wales) (iirc according to research it isn’t the windmills it is the increased and intensified ship traffic), if you were wondering why the article is written so badly that it seems like it is written by a dark side sneerclub commenter (aka a focus more on funny sneers than making an solid case, which is fine for this silly site, but he is pretending to be a science reporter).

      (Taking the risks of viruses (whatever their origin) is good of course, just deciding that covid is synthetic is sneerworthy, as is only focusing on synthetic viruses because handwave AGI intelligence is magic).

      Also note that Matt wrote a book arguing that covid came from a lab, so this article is also just book promotion. (he is also of course, a libertarian).