Chemical weapons are absolutely terrifying, especially the modern ones like VX. In recent years they have mostly been used for targeted assassinations by state actors (Kim Jong Nam, Salisbury Novichok poisonings).
If AI makes this stuff easier to carry out then we are completely fucked.
By the time people start to realize what's going on it will be too late.
Not that the meat industry would ever score an own goal like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
It doesn't matter much if the AI can give perfect "explain like I'm 5" instructions for making VX. The people who carry out those instructions are still risking their lives before claiming a single victim. They also need to spend a lot of money amount on acquiring laboratory equipment and chemicals that are far enough down the synthesis chain to avoid tipping off governments in advance.
The one big risk I can see, eventually, is if really capable AIs get connected to really capable robots. They would be "clanking replicators" capable of making anything at all, including VX or nuclear weapons. But that seems a long way off from where we are now. The people trumpeting X-Risk now don't think that the AIs need to be embodied to be an existential risk. I disagree with that for reasons that are too lengthy to elaborate here. But it's easy to see how robots that can make anything (including copies of themselves) would be the very sharpest of two-edged swords.
Then there are the script kiddies that find a tool online that someone smarter than them wrote and deploy it to wreak havoc. The script kiddies are the people I worry about. They don't have the maturity of doing the work and the emotional stability of older age and giving them something powerful through AI worries me.
Theorem: by the time someone reaches the intelligence level required to annihilate the world they can comprehend the implications of their actions.
And then there was the idiot that tried to draw a smiley face with bombs on the map of the USA:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91668&page=1
Because hey, why not...
That may or may not be somewhat the case in humans (there definitely are exceptions). Still, the opposite theorem, known as "Orthogonality thesis", states that, in general case, intelligence and value systems are mutually independent. There are good arguments for that being the case.
These conversations are oddly precious and intimate. It's so difficult to find someone that is willing to even 'go there' with you let alone someone that is capable of creatively and fearlessly advancing the conversation.
It's pretty sobering to realize how intellect applied to bad stuff can lead to advancing the 'state of the art' relatively quickly once you drop the usual constraints of ethics and morality.
To make a Nazi parallel: someone had to design the gas chambers, someone had to convince themselves that this was all ok and then go home to their wives and kids to be a loving father again. That sort of mental compartmentalization is apparently what humans are capable of and if there is any trait that we have that frightens me then that's the one. Because it allows us to do the most horrible things imaginable because we simply can imagine them. There are almost no restraints on actual execution given the capabilities themselves and it need not be very high tech to be terrible and devastating in effect.
Technology acts as a force multiplier though, so once you take a certain concept and optimize it using technology suddenly single unhinged individuals can do much more damage than they could ever do in the past. That's the problem with tools: they are always dual use and once tools become sufficiently powerful to allow a single individual to create something very impressive they likely allow a single individual to destroy something 100, 1000 or a million times larger than that. This asymmetry is limited only by our reach and the power of the tools.
You can witness this IRL every day when some hacker wrecks a company or one or more lives on the other side of the world. Without technology that kind of reach would be impossible.
>Technology acts as a force multiplier though
It really does, and to a point you made elsewhere infrastructure is effectively a multiplication of technology, so you wind up with ways to compound the asymmetric effect in powerful ways.
>Without technology that kind of reach would be impossible.
I worked for a bug bounty for a while and this was one of my takeaways. You have young kids with meager resources in challenging environments making meaningful contributions to the security of a Silicon Valley juggernaut.
I had to think about that sentence for a bit because as a rule I never start Googling when thinking about stuff like that. If I did I'd be on every watch list available by now. Might be on some of them anyway for some of the chemicals I've ordered over the years.
Really? In what substantive way?
Technology makes certain kind of bad acts more possible.
I think I was a bit shocked by that article in the day.
I contemplated the same before. How can I cause maximum panic (not even death!) that would result in economic damages and/or anti-freedom policy changes, for least amount of money/resources/risk of getting caught.
Yet here we are, peaceful and law-abiding citizens, building instead of destroying.
The ultimate truth is, if you don't like "The System", destroying it won't make things better. You need to put effort into building which is really hard!
Given a modest budget we all had to come up with a plan to destabilize society, 9/11 style attacks, whilst spectacular eventually don't really do a lot of damage, are costly and failure prone though they can definitely drive policy changes and result in a nation doing a lot of harm to itself it will ultimately survive. But what if your goal wasn't to create some media friendly attack but an actual disaster instead, what would it take.
The stories from that night continue to haunt me today. My own solution led to a lot of people going quiet for a bit and contemplating what they could do to defend against it and they realized there wasn't much that they could do, millions if not tens of millions of people would likely die and the budget was under a few hundred bucks. Knowledge about technology is all it takes to do real damage, that, coupled with a lack of restraint and compassion.
The resources are indeed asymmetrical: you need next to nothing to create mass havoc. Case in point: the Kennedy assassination changed the world and the bullet cost a couple of bucks assuming the shooter already had the rifle, and if they didn't it would increase the cost only a tiny little bit.
And you can do far, far worse than that for an extremely modest budget.