The AI arms race is a life and death thing. By Joanne Nova.

The nation that gets “there” first may get access to their adversaries encryption codes, crack their firewalls, hack their software, design the better drones, anti-missile weaponry, cure diseases and own the patents the world wants, or create the bioweapons that sabotage crops, generate fuel, or kill or cripple millions of people. That’s assuming AI doesn’t conquer us first.

This is why data centres are appearing everywhere and the “clean energy” revolution got left by the wayside.

As [US Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent said today “There is no day after tomorrow if we lose.”

“Beating China — there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said on Sept. 9 at Breitbart News’s “State of the Economy” event in Washington. “If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters.”

— Arthur Zhang,  The Epoch Times …

Been hearing a lot of anti-AI “news” lately? Who paid for it?

There is one main beneficiary of anti AI sentiment in the West and that’s China. Given the existential battle, China would be crazy if they weren’t pumping money into grassroots protests about AI datacentres in the US. …

Virus doom:

Last month a team created 16 entirely new viruses with the help of AI.

These are not viruses you and I could catch, they only infect a bacterium called E. coli. But if they wanted to make a virus that could infect humans, it could soon be a lot easier and faster than it would have been back in the prehistoric era of say, 2019. This should make anyone sit up and pay attention.

A virus that infects bacteria is called a bacteriophage. It’s a tiny molecular-machine in the order of 200nm in length that replicates. Once inside a hapless E. coli, it commandeers the cells machinery to produce hundreds of clones of itself. This one pictured here is one of the 16 new types of virions.

 

Natural selection is so yesterday, way too slow. Now we have unnatural selection:

Before Large Language Models, a research team had to culture real viruses in the laboratory, and they had to do it again and again to generate random mutations. One experiment ran for 13,000 generations and took six months. That team found the virus had accumulated 11 new mutations every 20 days. Then they’d have to test each mutant to see if it behaved the way they hoped, but it was all so random.

Now they just ask the AI, which is trained on millions of genomes from all domains of life. It generated and evaluated thousands of different genomes, and narrowed the list to 300. The team synthesized these 300 different viruses in the lab and tested them to find 16 entirely new viable viruses. That’s never been done before.

AI doesn’t merely accelerate evolution. It proposed a genome on the other side of an evolutionary gap without nature having to walk through all the intervening generations.

Shhh:

In theory, if they dumped these new viruses into people, swamps or chicken pens which had the right E. coli, they might peter out in a day, infecting a few bacteria and vanishing. But it’s also possible it could eventually spread far and wide — a right nightmare for E. coli. These new viruses could live on and spread in perpetuity, killing a lot of E. coli along the way until the bacterium evolved some resistance, after which the virus would mutate to counter that.

I asked one AI if this was correct and it replied at length expanding on it, until seconds later it suddenly deleted its own answer and said “This content can’t be shown”. We’re especially careful with request6s involving biological research and applications that could pose safety risks.” Well that sure makes me feel safe…

Consider:

In the next world war, a bad global citizen country could acquire the capability to design viruses and maybe also the drugs or vaccines to save themselves, before unleashing them onto adversaries. …

The truth is we’ve always had deadly diseases to throw at any enemies — like Smallpox, Ebola, Marberg and Nipah. The thing that stopped us (apart from the morality bomb) is the blowback. Whatever virus is unleashed on the world will come back to hit the instigator too. This is where AI makes it all so much more dangerous. What if some overconfident General thinks his group has a vaccine that will save them? Suddenly the unthinkable becomes a strategy.