[lukan]

"Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species."

How?

If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon, it would not spread quickly but die out. If it is very contagious .. but very, very slow incubation time, so it infects the whole world, before becoming a deadly disease ... then I would say it is far beyond the possibility of a basement workshop to remotely design anything like this. I doubt the professional state labs can create something to wipe out humanity. Dramatically disturb? For sure. Covid was not really deadly in comparison, but already problematic.

[unsupp0rted]

Viruses are perhaps the 3rd or 4th thing down the list of scary biological things people might make in their basement to end the human world.

[totetsu]

These are plenty of people worried about this. Just one example https://openai.com/index/preparing-for-future-ai-capabilitie...

[orbital-decay]

This type of research requires experimentation (mostly failures) on extremely complex real-world equipment. Same with the nuclear weapons. AI being able to magically figure it out without experimental grounding is pure and absolute fantasy, used by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic as a justification for monopolizing AI R&D. In a sense it's not surprising this idea comes from rationalism-adjacent folks, as rationalism is mostly about the idea that experimentation is irrelevant and you can infer anything using just logic alone.

[estearum]

> If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon, it would not spread quickly but die out. If it is very contagious .. but very, very slow incubation time, so it infects the whole world, before becoming a deadly disease ..

This is a made up equilibrium that actually does not need to exist in nature.

Viruses and bacteria can in fact be both extremely, extremely contagious and extremely, extremely lethal.

> If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon,

Trivially: you actually can have a virus that kills everything it touches not soon. Nothing in biology or chemistry or physics prevents it.

[kcplate]

> Viruses and bacteria can in fact be both extremely, extremely contagious and extremely, extremely lethal.

Sure, but those two things would tend to work against it becoming a pandemic— unless it managed those two things but also kept its host healthy enough for long enough before becoming lethal to adequately spread it.