Patrick Collison: commitment

Transcript context

…How do you think about the dual use possibilities of biotech? I am sympathetic with the idea that if you think of prior technology, like Google search or even the computer itself, you could forecast in advance, like: "Oh, this has all this dual use stuff." But for some reason, history has been kind to us. The meta-lesson here is: “Keep doing science.” With biotech, we don't have to go into specifics here, but are there specific things you can think of with this specific technology? You can imagine some nefarious things. How do you think about that? Why not focus, let's say, on ameliorating the risks first or something like that? I don't think that the binding constraint on harmful use of biotechnology or bioweapons today is pure biological capabilities. If some set of incredibly capable, intelligent people wanted to cause tremendous harm, presumably with pathogens or with something biological, they wouldn't necessarily need to invent anything new. They would just need to apply currently known techniques in a malevolently directed fashion. There are some concerns and risks with respect to things that don't invent new technologies, but do make them more accessible. The question is, what would the effect on the world be if there was a sufficiently sophisticated LLM that could help anybody synthesize and disperse smallpox? I don't know laws of physics that prohibit such an LLM existing — I presume they don't. Would the world be fine if such an LLM was widely distributed? Maybe, but maybe not. So there is that threat factor, but my point is: I don't think knowledge at the frontier of biology is the relevant margin here. If we take this seriously, we don't need crazy AI risks to motivate this. The world is perfectly capable of originating really severe pandemics and pathogens itself, plus all the other diseases that are not pathogenic. So we got other problems. Whether we care about the possible dual use harms you just mentioned, or we just care about things that already exist, to ameliorate both of those, we do need enhancement of our capabilities. There are a lot of biological problems that we don't know how to solve today. In that respect, if one were to do what you're proposing and try to advance the defensive side of this, I don't know that, what one would do, would necessarily be that different. Because there are just fundamental capabilities that we would presumably need to have, that we don't have today. By trying to solve current human diseases, you're probably also pursuing something pretty close to the best steps to solve the potential diseases that malicious actors could cause in the future. That makes sense. Zooming out from bio risk in particular, how are you thinking about AI these days?…

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