I’m finding this conversation frustrating. It seems to me that your grandparent comment was specifically talking about biotech & pandemics. For example, you said “wet nanotech/biotech”. And then in that context you said “”blight” that could very, very, very slowly damage our agriculture, cause disease in humans, and expand the AI’s influence, on the scale of decades or centuries”. This sure sounds to me like a claim that a novel pandemic would spread over the course of decades or centuries. Right? And such a claim is patently absurd. It did not take decades or centuries for COVID to spread around the world. (Even before mass air travel, it did not take decades or centuries for Spanish Flu to spread around the world.) Instead of acknowledging that mistake, your response is “a pathogen is not grey nanotech, but biotech”, which is missing the point—I was disputing a claim that you made about biotech.
their deadliness is inverse to their contagiousness for obvious reasons (dead men don’t travel very well).
Famously, when you catch COVID, you can become infectious a day or two before you become symptomatic. (That’s why it was so hard to contain.) And COVID also could cause nerve-damage that presumably had nothing to do with its ability to spread. More generally, it seems perfectly possible for a disease to have a highly-contagious-but-not-too-damaging early phase and then a few days later it turns lethal, perhaps by spreading into a totally different part of the body. So I strongly disbelieve the claim that deadliness and contagiousness of engineered pathogens are inevitably inverse, let alone that this is “obvious”.
sorry if the thread of my comment got messy, I did mention somewhere that COVID-like pathogen would likely be worst case scenario, for the reasons you mentioned above (long incubation).
However, I believe that COVID pandemic actually proves that humanity is robust against such threats. Quarantine worked. Masks worked. Vaccines worked. Soap and disinfectant worked. As human response would scale up with the danger inherent in any pandemic, I think that anything significantly more deadly that COVID would be stopped even faster, due to far more draconian quarantine responses.
With those in place, I do not see how a pathogen could be used to “wipe out humanity”. Decimate, yes. Annihilate? No.
But as I agreed in another thread, we should cut that conversation now. Discussing this online is literally feeding ideas to our potential enemy (be it AI or misaligned humans).
fair enough. most countries’ responses left a lot to be desired. a few countries that are general known for having their act together overall did for covid too, but it didn’t include some critical large population countries.
If I was a malicious AI trying to design a pandemic.
Don’t let it start in one place and slowly spread. Get 100 brainwashed humans to drop it in 100 water reservoirs all at once across the world. No warning. No slow spreading, it’s all over the earth from day 1.
Don’t make one virus, make at least 100, each with different mechanisms of action. Good luck with the testing and vaccines.
Spread the finest misinformation. Detailed plausible and subtly wrong scientific papers.
Generally interfere with humanities efforts to fix the problem. Top vaccine scientists die in freak accidents.
Give the diseases a long incubation period where they are harmless but highly effective, then they turn leathal.
Make the diseases have mental effects. Make people confident that they aren’t infected, less cautious about infecting others, or if you can make everyone infected a high functioning psycopath plotting to infect as many other people as possible.
I’m finding this conversation frustrating. It seems to me that your grandparent comment was specifically talking about biotech & pandemics. For example, you said “wet nanotech/biotech”. And then in that context you said “”blight” that could very, very, very slowly damage our agriculture, cause disease in humans, and expand the AI’s influence, on the scale of decades or centuries”. This sure sounds to me like a claim that a novel pandemic would spread over the course of decades or centuries. Right? And such a claim is patently absurd. It did not take decades or centuries for COVID to spread around the world. (Even before mass air travel, it did not take decades or centuries for Spanish Flu to spread around the world.) Instead of acknowledging that mistake, your response is “a pathogen is not grey nanotech, but biotech”, which is missing the point—I was disputing a claim that you made about biotech.
Famously, when you catch COVID, you can become infectious a day or two before you become symptomatic. (That’s why it was so hard to contain.) And COVID also could cause nerve-damage that presumably had nothing to do with its ability to spread. More generally, it seems perfectly possible for a disease to have a highly-contagious-but-not-too-damaging early phase and then a few days later it turns lethal, perhaps by spreading into a totally different part of the body. So I strongly disbelieve the claim that deadliness and contagiousness of engineered pathogens are inevitably inverse, let alone that this is “obvious”.
I also suggest reading this article.
sorry if the thread of my comment got messy, I did mention somewhere that COVID-like pathogen would likely be worst case scenario, for the reasons you mentioned above (long incubation).
However, I believe that COVID pandemic actually proves that humanity is robust against such threats. Quarantine worked. Masks worked. Vaccines worked. Soap and disinfectant worked. As human response would scale up with the danger inherent in any pandemic, I think that anything significantly more deadly that COVID would be stopped even faster, due to far more draconian quarantine responses.
With those in place, I do not see how a pathogen could be used to “wipe out humanity”. Decimate, yes. Annihilate? No.
But as I agreed in another thread, we should cut that conversation now. Discussing this online is literally feeding ideas to our potential enemy (be it AI or misaligned humans).
did we live through the same pandemic?
we very likely did not, given the span of it, and various national responses.
fair enough. most countries’ responses left a lot to be desired. a few countries that are general known for having their act together overall did for covid too, but it didn’t include some critical large population countries.
If I was a malicious AI trying to design a pandemic.
Don’t let it start in one place and slowly spread. Get 100 brainwashed humans to drop it in 100 water reservoirs all at once across the world. No warning. No slow spreading, it’s all over the earth from day 1.
Don’t make one virus, make at least 100, each with different mechanisms of action. Good luck with the testing and vaccines.
Spread the finest misinformation. Detailed plausible and subtly wrong scientific papers.
Generally interfere with humanities efforts to fix the problem. Top vaccine scientists die in freak accidents.
Give the diseases a long incubation period where they are harmless but highly effective, then they turn leathal.
Make the diseases have mental effects. Make people confident that they aren’t infected, less cautious about infecting others, or if you can make everyone infected a high functioning psycopath plotting to infect as many other people as possible.