Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I don't know how those plans are going now, but. I think some of them are definitely have to be at least be rethought on a couple levels, I'm sure. Let's do one more beat on pandemics too. I think maybe, and to the degree you can focus this on the AI angle on pandemics, I think the audience is If there's one, it's a pretty diverse actually, I've learned over time, but if there's one thing that unites us, it is a general obsession with AI. So I think obviously some of the things that people can do on pandemics are not going to be AI related, but increasingly it seems like some are. And I'm interested in your thoughts on pandemic prevention, but especially as it intersects with AI. Yeah, I think. Pandemics is a really exciting area because there's just so much to do that would really help reduce the risks. And with all these alignment issues, everything is much more debated. We don't really know what's helping or hurting much more. But with pandemics, people agree there's a lot of things we can do that would very likely help. And then in terms of using AI to help reduce these risks, I think there could be some things in this area. We could be using AI to do better disease surveillance and to monitor all these gene synthesis companies and check that they're not being used to manufacture viruses, like super deadly viruses. But the main thing that comes to mind to me is just all the things we need to do in pandemics is just, it's like these very entrepreneurial engineering build type projects. And I would say if you're an AI, if you're like, you're working on AI now and you have this kind of, I just know how to build stuff with AI, I know how to just make systems with AI, get stuff done. then you could just apply that to these bio risk projects and take that just take that skill that kind of like entrepreneurial doing doing stuff skill set and apply it to this cause. And like a couple of the projects that need to happen that are like waste wastewater monitoring so that we can pick up detect new pandemics really early. The cool thing about this is you can just synthesize all the DNA and then you can look for anything that's growing exponentially And that's a signature in pandemic. And that lets you pick up pandemics that are even completely unobserved in the past. You can potentially detect them earlier. There's, yeah, red teaming or the gene synthesis companies to mean that it's not easy to use them to start developing dangerous segments of virus DNA. That's like preventing it from happening at all. The wastewater stuff is making sure we know quickly when it is actually starting. And then the third is just lots of measures to prevent spreading once we've noticed something. Again, we could just design much better PPE that's cheaper, more effective, more comfortable. And then we could have huge stockpiles of it just ready to go for when the next pandemic happens. And then we could just give them to all the essential workers who during COVID did keep working, but that's because COVID was like not actually very dangerous for young people. But if you had a pandemic that killed 10% of people or even 80% of people who got it, I don't think you'd see a lot of people packing shelves at supermarkets. So we would need PPE to keep society functioning. And that is the kind of thing that costs billions of dollars, but that's not expensive on the scale of the risks here and budgets and so on. And then, stuff like air filtration, like in homes, if you have positive air pressure, you filter the air that comes in, have positive air pressure, then it's like basically preventing air from flowing into your house. and it can keep it pretty clean.…

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