My biggest intellectual embarrassment is that I used to be a degrowther. Damn, that was mad stupid.

The more I read, the more it becomes clear: America has problems, but Europe is absolutely fucked on many different axes with almost no possible escape.

That is not going to be pretty.

I agree with Noah Smith that the real risk of AI is bioterrorism, not any nebulous superintelligence. It allows people who prior to AI would not have possessed enough skills nor knowledge to create and iterate on novel viral lines that could prove quite deadly.

Within the next decade, I’d put the odds at about 15% that someone designs and releases some virus or bacterium with AI that kills more than 100,000 people.

If I cared to do such a thing with AI, I could already do it. And I’m not nearly the smartest person around. Just depending on people not feeling like doing such a thing is not a great defense.

I did not need AI to build a functional wet lab, if I’d wanted to. But I’m pretty sure with AI I could build one in 6-10 months that’d allow me to create something very dangerous very quickly. Before AI, I suspect the “creating something very dangerous part” would’ve taken me more like 4-7 years.

The important point is that this lowers the bar. Prior, only a few people with 140+ IQs working together could do this. Now, it only takes one person with ~115 IQ. And that’s an enormous difference that matters.

Of my six main friends in high school, only two of us are still alive. This was true before any of us turned 40, by the way.

Oh, I see someone else had the same childhood I did, huh?

Yes. Canada will become “Norther Dakota.”

I don’t think Canada will collapse, though. Just become a lot more like Mexico, as they let in too many feral third worlders, and will incur the consequences of that.

Well, he’s not wrong.

They took themselves out of history and will soon be Islamicized.

Europe’s future is very, very bad.

If you’ve ever been in a legit fist fight, what life lesson did you learn after the first time you were in one?

That if you try grappling with a guy a lot bigger than you, you’re definitely gonna lose.

Give me 8-12 months and I could create a virus without LLM use that’d drop all y’all, given the funding. There are roughly 100,000 people in the world as smart as I am, so the pool of those who could achieve something like that pre-LLM is not too gigantic.

However, there are probably 100 million that could complete this task with LLM use. And someday soon, a lot more people will realize that and give it a go. Good times, good times.