Prashanth Vaidya

I completely agree with this take related to the “AI will create viruses that will kill us all” BS. But let me add my few cents, because I am really really angry! I worked with one of the deadliest viruses in history, HIV, for two decades. I was one of the early scientists to engineer it, and engineered versions of HIV are now helping cancer patients. I understand the immune system that defends us against viruses extremely deeply. I have worked in high security biohazard labs. I don’t have a PhD in AI, but I have been involved with AI since the early 90s and have been all in on AI for years. People claiming that you can just make a virus in your garage, use AI to engineer it, and somehow build a virus that will kill everyone don’t know what the hell they are talking about! Of course bioweapons are extremely dangerous. In fact, viruses and bacteria have killed more humans throughout history than almost anything else. HIV alone killed tens of millions of people, yet today, if you have access to effective medicines and take them properly, HIV is generally no longer a death sentence. COVID-19 killed millions. Why doesn’t it kill at anything close to the same scale anymore? Not because the virus disappeared. It is still here. We developed collective defenses against it through our immune systems, prior exposure, vaccines, treatments, and better medical care. And this is exactly the point. The best way to fight biological threats, whether natural or synthetic, is to use AI to develop vaccines, treatments, antibodies, antivirals, and eventually engineer our immune system to create much stronger defenses against them. By the way, it is already possible to make synthetic viruses. You don’t need some hypothetical superintelligent AI model to do that. We have had sophisticated molecular biology and genetic engineering for decades. So how many people have actually died from synthetic viruses compared with natural viruses killing millions every year? And if someday there really is an AI capable of making some unbelievable “supervirus,” then why the hell wouldn’t that same AI make it even easier to develop defenses against it? Or cure diseases, for that matter? Where is this damn superintelligence that has cured a single major disease?! These AI companies and AI doomers keep talking like, “OMG, AI is going to become so unbelievably powerful that it could kill all of humanity!” Then why is nobody asking the obvious question? If your AI is already becoming this godlike, unbelievably powerful intelligence, why hasn’t it cured anything? I mean ANYTHING. Where is the cure for cancer? Where is the cure for Alzheimer’s? Where is the cure for aging? Forget those. Where is the vaccine that prevents the common cold? You are telling me this intelligence will soon be smart enough to engineer some magical virus capable of wiping out 8 billion people, defeating every immune system, every vaccine, every antiviral, every laboratory, every government, and the entire global biomedical community… …but somehow it still can’t cure one disease? I call that greatest intellectual dishonesty ever! At least WE actually know how to cure things and save millions of lives with our supposedly stupid human intelligence compared with this future “superintelligence.” Humans eradicated smallpox, which killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history. We turned HIV from a almost certain death sentence into a manageable disease. We developed vaccines in record time against COVID. If we had the same AI back then, would have saved millions more! We engineer immune cells to kill cancer. We developed antibiotics, antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, organ transplantation, and thousands of medicines. We aren't fast enough but we did all of that with our ordinary human intelligence. So imagine what actual superintelligence could do for medicine! And here is the part that really makes me angry. If you actually have, or are close to having, an AI capable of curing diseases and saving millions of lives, and you are deliberately slowing it down or refusing to make those capabilities available, then we also need to talk about the human cost of THAT decision, which you fearmongering people are going to be responsible for! More than 150,000 people die every single day around the world. Every. Single. Day. More than 90% from Cancer, heart disease, infections, aging. How many die because of AI? ZERO! Talk about the people dying TODAY. Talk about curing cancer. Talk about stopping the next pandemic before it starts. Talk about developing universal vaccines. Talk about engineering our immune system so viruses become almost irrelevant. Talk about curing genetic diseases. Talk about reversing aging. Talk about saving millions and eventually billions of lives. Instead, we constantly hear this “AI WILL KILL US ALL!” crap, delivered with absolute certainty and with this smug smile on your faces in front of cameras, as though imagining a science fiction extinction scenarios. I am actually angry about this. Each one of you causing a delay in AI advance every single day will be personally responsible for those 100 thousands deaths that could have been prevented! Because if you truly believe intelligence is about to become this powerful, then the greatest question humanity should be asking is NOT: “How could this intelligence hurt us?” It should also be: “WHY THE HELL AREN’T WE USING IT TO SAVE EVERYONE WE CAN?” And if superintelligence really is coming, then make sure one of the first things we do with it is make humanity biologically damn near impossible to kill.