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Comment by colingauvin | Hacker News Reader

No, a human could do (and have, many many many times, see like half of molecular biology) this as well. If anything this will help with vaccine development.

Edit: I'm a PhD biochemist that has done a fair bit of virus modification. Love the downvotes. Never change HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Same reason it couldn't be a problem to sell aerosolized anthrax at the hardware store. Humans have (many many times) made aerosolized anthrax. Can't see any conceivable problem with more people having access to it.

I agree with you. I favor the view that humans are generally morally good when taken on the whole. There already exists the technology for ne'er-do-wells to engineer viruses and unleash them on the world. But I submit that A) there aren't many people who want to do that in the first place; and B) there's a vanishingly small amount of people who want to work with those people to help them achieve it.

That doesn’t invalidate the point, you’re just saying it’s already a risk

No, I'm saying AI has not introduced any fundamentally new capabilities to anyone in this space. Making a virus that grows in a cell is one thing. Making a virus that is an existential risk to humans is altogether another and would require significant new capabilities that do not exist and are not likely to from these training data. (Pre-existing sequences).

Enzymes haven't introduced any fundamentally new capabilities. Any reaction they catalyze could just happen on its own.

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