Why AI-assisted bioweapons won't kill us all
Fantastic post from Abi Olvera, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks, with some cold water for the genuine level of risk of an AI-assisted bioweapon. This is timely, as this is one of the primary risks proposed by AI doomers:
Yes, AI makes virology work a little easier. But it is still extremely difficult. Media headlines often say “AI can make this step easier” without the broader context that a bioweapon involves a lot of hard steps that are not easier.
AI can supply biology and chemistry knowledge, but not hands-on skill. Reading every surgery textbook doesn’t make you a good surgeon. The biology laboratory works in a similar apprenticeship model. You learn by failing repeatedly under a mentor who has also failed repeatedly. [..]
A motivated team of scientists with institutional access could keep trying and eventually succeed at making a pathogen. But success would not necessarily produce a new pandemic. Any pathogen that a team could plausibly assemble is one that already exists in nature. A lab-assembled version of COVID-19 would have about the same effect as an infected person coughing in a crowded room.
And here's why we aren't hearing this via news channels:
When I published this research, leaders in biosecurity and national security organizations thanked me privately. “My organization found the same conclusion, hence why we don’t work on that.” Null results aren’t often published. Looking at the media sphere specifically: “bioweapons are hard” is not news. It isn’t a headline; it’s always been true.
Advocacy organizations have similar constraints. If you are pushing for AI oversight, a finding that undercuts urgency on one specific threat does not help.
Biologists, the people best positioned to explain this, mostly don’t write for general audiences. Academic incentives don’t reward op-eds, especially about things that are obvious within the field.
Our information systems get less accurate as issues become politicized. Alarm, not context, ends up on the news partly because of who is incentivized to speak up.
Tags: ai p-doom doom llms bioweapons risks abi-olvera