This is with Clare Wilson, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox every week, you can sign up here.
Hello, and welcome back to .
You may have heard the alarming claim that there’s more than a 10 per cent chance humanity will be wiped out by super-intelligent AI.
This assertion, made by a researcher at Anthropic, was scant on detail about exactly how the technology could kill us all.
But this week I heard about one possible way, which wasn’t previously top of my list of things to worry about: AI could be used to make a lethal pathogen and trigger another pandemic.
EU announces plan to restrict social media access for under-15s
The EU has announced plans to restrict social media access for under-15s across its member states, in a bid to tackle online safety.
How would it work?
There would be a gradual approach to children using social media which would include banning access for under 13s.
13 to 15-year-olds would be able to access platforms for an hour a day via “mini accounts” set up through their parent’s account.
3 min read
4 min read
A closer look at the detail
The European Commission said social media companies would need to prove platforms were safe by design or face fines of up to 6 per cent of their global sales.
The restrictions would not just affect well-known apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat but also YouTube and other video sharing platforms as well as AI chatbots and online games.
What did the EU chief say?
Too many children are being exposed too early to an online world they are not ready to navigate – an environment where bullying can follow you home, where every mistake can be recorded forever.
Ursula von der Leyen
The crocodile-ridden river chosen as Olympic rowing venue
A river inhabited by around 500 saltwater crocodiles has been greenlit as the venue for Olympic and Paralympic rowing and canoeing events at the 2032 Brisbane Games.
Seal of approval
The location approved to host the events is on the Fitzroy River in Rockhampton, Queensland.
The independent technical assessment of the waters’ suitability did not take into account the crocodiles but examined how the course would perform under various circumstances and weather conditions.
How safe is the river?
- Olympic officials have previously been assured of the safety of the location, but British representatives are among those to raise concerns.
- The river is already a training and competition venue for flatwater sports, supporting school state championships and national team training camps, the report said.
- Contingency plans are in place and the route has been endorsed by World Rowing and Paddle Worldwide.
5 min read
Concerns downplayed
There are sharks in the ocean and we’re still surfing… it’s a can do, not a can’t do – please change the mindset here.
Speaking last year, Brisbane 2032 president Andrew Liveris dismissed concerns about crocodiles.
Nine countries can shelve EES checks for the rest of the year
At least nine European countries have been allowed to delay the full roll-out of controversial border biometric checks until the end of the year, The i Paper’s Joe Palmer and Joe Duggan can reveal.
Brussels has given extensions to several member states after a deadline for full implementation of the Entry/Exit System (EES) for non-EU nationals at Schengen area airports passed earlier this month.
Which countries are they?
At least nine European countries have been allowed to waive the full introduction of EES until the technology required for the necessary facial and fingerprint scans is working effectively.
Countries granted the exemption include:
What is EES?
EES, which launched last October, is replacing manual passport stamping, but has led to queues as long as seven hours at border checkpoints. Some passengers have been forced to miss their flights.
3 min read
A closer look at the EES crisis
When asked about the nine countries yet to fully introduce the checks, a spokesperson for the European Commission told The i Paper it was in “close and constructive contact with those few member states where some adjustments are still needed at certain border crossing points”.
The warnings came at a press conference held this week by disease experts from Imperial College London’s biosecurity network.
“I believe it’s highly unlikely we’ll get an extinction-level event,” said epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson. “That doesn’t mean I think there’s zero threat.”
So, what might such an AI-created bioweapon look like and how could we stop it from being created?
Starting template for bioweapon
One reason this threat has to be taken seriously is that pandemics with high fatality rates have previously arisen naturally without needing any help from super-intelligent AI.
The Spanish flu, which hit at the end of the First World War, killed an estimated 5 per cent of the world’s population. In more recent memory, the Covid pandemic killed a smaller fraction of people – perhaps about 0.2 per cent – but was still hugely damaging and frightening.
The UK Health Security Agency last year made a list of 24 groups of pathogens that have most potential for triggering a dangerous pandemic. It includes members of the coronavirus family, to which Covid and Sars belong, as well as others such as mpox, bird flu and Ebola.
The agency drew up this list so researchers can focus on developing vaccines and treatments in case of natural pandemics – but they could also be the starting template for an AI-designed super-bug.
AI changes things because the genetic engineering of viruses or bacteria used to need a lot of money, large well-equipped laboratories and a great deal of expert knowledge. In other words, it would only have been possible in universities or other state-funded laboratories.
No matter how much leaders of states such as Russia or Iran may dislike the West, it is hard to imagine them releasing a deadly virus, because it would also kill their own citizens. We have seen with Covid how infectious diseases have no respect for borders.
But in the past few decades it has become more possible for anyone to dabble in genetic engineering of viruses or bacteria, in the so-called “garage biology” hobbyist movement using cheap second-hand lab equipment.
You can now even buy a self-contained kit that lets you insert a gene from jellyfish into harmless bacteria, and watch your genetically-engineered colonies of bugs glow in the dark as they multiply.
The concern is that AI could now provide instructions on how to make more dangerous bugs. “One fear is that AI allows people to put together the instruction manual more readily. That is something that governments and Imperial are thinking about,” said Professor Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London.
How close is AI to designing a deadly virus?
The most advanced generative AI programmes have certainly proved capable of some impressive feats, such as solving previously insurmountable maths problems, including finding a solution last week to one called the Navier-Stokes problem concerning the movement of fluids.
In some ways, biology is harder for AI to crack than maths or physics, because it is more complex. But in 2020, Google announced its AI programme had “largely solved” a 50-year-old biology problem of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins, based only on their sequence of amino acid building blocks.
However, it is a much trickier problem to go from a pathogen’s genetic sequence to knowing how it will behave in its human hosts – in other words, whether a DNA tweak would make something more deadly.
They are not there yet. Some university groups are currently using AI for benign purposes to design new genes and even whole new viruses. But the computers rarely get it right first time: each attempt has to be tested on cells in a dish or animals before it’s perfected, said Professor Tom Ellis, co-director of Imperial’s Centre for Engineering Biology.
“A lot of what it would design at the DNA level will not work first time,” he said. “And the experiments to validate and test [the DNA sequences] are still long and arduous.”
Those experiments are not what someone working out of their garage could achieve – not to mention they would also risk dying from their own bioweapon without high-quality containment equipment.
But one hallmark of AI is how fast it is advancing. So, it would be irresponsible not to start considering how individuals could be stopped from carrying out such a plan in future, said epidemiologist Professor Azra Ghani.
Security checks
At the moment, firms making the raw materials that could be used to make bioweapons – like certain viruses or DNA that encodes potentially dangerous genes – tend to have multiple security checks. These ensure the materials are only sent out to scientists working at regulated laboratories, who can show they are studying potential treatments, vaccines and so on.
But these are currently voluntary. What we need are international agreements to make such security checks mandatory, said Barclay, the virologist. “We need some level of regulation of access to the tools.”
Stricter regulation will be on the agenda at a series of meetings on pandemic preparedness around the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week. “The aim is to think ahead of time about how these threats are changing and how we’re going to detect novel threats,” said Ghani, who will attend the meetings.
Ultimately, Ghani said, most scientists think a future pandemic is more likely to have natural origins than to arise from an engineered bioweapon.
And our best chance of combating these natural pandemics with new drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tests? That could also be help from AI.
Two months after it opened I have finally seen Christopher Nolan’s , and it was worth the wait. As someone who grew up reading the Greek myths, I found this modern retelling true to their spirit in terms of excitement, casual cruelty and gut-churning horror.
The Cyclops in particular was not for the faint-hearted. And nor is the film for the weak-bladdered, at nearly three hours long. This is one movie trip not to be accompanied with a soft drink.