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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

For all the hand wringing we're doing over AI, I'm surprised that post-covid, regardless of origin, there wasn't a more serious discussion on what sorts of biological research are worth the risk.

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It's because The Experts (specifically those in the public space) made it clear that they Had Spoken and that COVID had come from a wet market. From there, any dissent was met with incredible vitriol that still lasts to this day.

Covid can come from a wet market and we can have a discussion about virus research. These two things aren't connected.

Can we really? Can we really have a discussion if suggesting that COVID-19 may have come from a lab leak at a top tier virology lab doing cutting edge GoF research gets one labeled a racist?

First of all I said we didn’t have to resolve whether or not COVID-19 came from a lab in order to have a discussion of whether or not we should have bioweapons and other viral research labs.

Second of all. No, you racist.

Haha, I get where you're coming from but I still disagree. It's a question of the baseline risk, if COVID occurred naturally then there's a much higher chance of similar pandemics happening again and risky research like GoF makes sense. But if it was a lab leak, then it's harder to justify. There are other parts to if of course, if you think that covert bioweapon research is common then it probably doesn't matter.

I think this is in part because more people have some amount of knowledge about software and can directly see the effect AI has on the job market around them than do about biological research. Biological research labs usually don't expose convenient chat interfaces, besides, you only hear and read about them in scientific papers as long as things go well.

But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.

bingo. my mom logs into ChatGPT and uses it for basic stuff.

nothing like a dev getting whole APIs built, but she understands what the tool is and how it may impact office workers, even if on a superficial, sci-fi sort of way.

i don't think she could tell you anything about RNA vaccines or mitosis

No one wants to give up their grant money. That was a big part of the letters floating around during covid asking/begging to keep things quiet IIRC. No one wanted their money pulled.

Because discussions of the idea that covid was the result of biological research was shut down hard, and suggesting it would quickly get you labeled as conspiracy theorist or put in a camp with the most extreme vaccine deniers

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