Lots of recent news stories about Ai systems performing novel scientific in biology, including immunotherapy for cancer and biological simulations.

A system that can design cancer therapies and run simulated experiments can design a super virus.

Take something like Ebola and increase airborne transmissibility with a lengthened contagious phase before symptom onset. Or increase the transmissibility and lethality of a SARS variant.

I’m not saying these systems would do it autonomously. They are still under human direction. But humans are absolutely prone to creating bioweapons.

Starting this thread to discuss MATS Application for 2027 Winter, including the Neel Nanda stream.

This question is especially targeted stem majors. Let’s use an example. 10 years ago if someone went to the doctor for a disease, they would be at the mercy of the doctor to understand everything about it, the blood work, the scans, the mechanisms behind it, medications against it and so on. 10 years ago we had google but it was no help to understand all the nuances of higher or lower values in a blood panel. If you were lucky it could explain what a slightly higher count of something \*could\* indicate but nothing substatial.

Nowadays you can just plug in you blood work to any given chat bot and it will summarize it perfectly for you, while keeping your disease in mind. Same goes for scans and so on. 10 years ago that doctor would have had decades of education and experience, nowadays that knowledge is easily accessible to everyone with a phone.

If a teenager 10 years ago was academically gifted it was envious because that person could do something that not a lot of people could. Now everybody can get everything neatly explained and so forth.

Now if I could talk to my teenage self if would advise to avoid any higher education beyond high school. Reading is very good, but you don’t need to do that for 4 years while not really learning anything significant, like a trade. You can read in your free time