Spartacast 18

Hello everyone, Spartacus here for an eighteenth Spartacast.

As I interacted with Claude for my last podcast, there was a thought that remained stuck in my head the entire time.

How is it that scientists have the audacity to do any of this?

They’re not just playing around with chimeric viruses, even though that’s plenty bad enough on its own. They’re forging ahead, seemingly without a care in the world, on things that we’d long thought forbidden.

In my last podcast, I experimented a bit with wringing some information about IoB out of Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet LLM. Most of the AI’s responses were reasonably accurate, including the different formulae, however, it made at least one assertion that was unverifiable, which was that Ian Akyildiz’s team was involved with Fat-IBC. As far as I can tell, these are two groups that are largely separate, and Claude fabricated the connection between them on the basis that it sounded plausible. I am quite certain that Ian Akyildiz and Josep Jornet are also aware of the principle of using low RF attenuation in adipose tissue to their advantage, separately. You can’t trust LLMs to cite sources correctly, or even to be right about basically anything at all. Any time you use an AI for research, you must follow up on and double-check every single thing it regurgitates to make sure you have a solid source. You can never take what those things say at face value, ever.

The people who held the Asilomar Conference were justifiably concerned about the possibility of genetic engineering contaminating the biosphere or human germlines. The synthetic biology tech that we have nowadays would be far more consequential for humanity and the environment if misused than anything we had fifty years ago. The technology we have now is more advanced by leaps and bounds. We’re not just tweaking existing genes, or making transgenic plants, animals and microbes. We’re at the point now where we can use machine learning tools to create entirely new genes from scratch. De novo gene and protein engineering. It’s honestly one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard of.

A number of Ex-Meta AI scientists recently came up with an algorithm called ESM3, and they published a paper on it where they used it to make an entirely new, structurally unique variant of the Green Fluorescent Protein called esmGFP. Naturally occurring GFP is found in jellyfish, ordinarily, and fluoresces when exposed to light. This new protein was engineered basically from scratch with AI-driven protein structure prediction.

They even bragged that they could design entirely new enzymes like a PETase to break down polyethylene terephthalate.

Danger, Will Robinson!

I have lots and lots of issues with this.

1. An intelligent AI model capable of engineering proteins from scratch could suffer from exactly the same issues with alignment and deceptiveness that other AIs do. How do we know the AI won’t try to replicate features of itself in a biological format and escape into the biosphere?

2. Ever hear of enzyme promiscuity? Proteins adopt many different conformations all the time. Each protein is, in itself, an extremely complex system resistant to complete analysis. Can we account for every single potential conformation? Every possible reaction?

3. What about accidentally creating new allergens or driving autoimmunity by synthesizing proteins near enough to self that antibodies against them are cross-reactive with human proteins?

4. What if microbes in the environment steal these synthetic genes through horizontal gene transfer and it leads to the evolution of unexpected new pathogens? How long before some moron decides to engineer synthetic bacteria to break down wood pulp, and then we have a cellulose-eater destroying crops all over the planet?

5. What about the horrifying weaponization potential? Yeah, let’s just start working on chimera viruses with AI-engineered proteins and motifs in them. I’m sure that will end well.

In Greg Bear’s 1985 novel Blood Music, the scientist Vergil Ulam designs tiny biocomputers based on his own lymphocytes. When he was told to cancel the project, he injected himself with them and smuggled them out of the lab. Then, those cells started “optimizing” him. And soon after that, everyone else. Millions of people got biologically gray-gooed and then suddenly ascended to another plane of existence. Is that what the morons in the biotech establishment are trying to do? Are they trying to Blood Music us? Because when I hear AI-designed proteins, that’s the first thing that comes to my mind.

It’s a far more plausible scenario than people would think. AI don’t have to run on computers alone. That’s just one substrate. Biology is another substrate that AI can run on. DNA computers, lipid-based logic gates, chemical computation through receptor-ligand interactions, et cetera. There’s actually a 2006 paper by Ron Unger and John Moult entitled Towards computing with proteins. To quote the abstract, “We discuss how to design protein molecules that would serve as the basic computational element by functioning as a NAND logical gate, utilizing DNA tags for recognition, and phosphorylation and exonuclease reactions for information processing. A solution of these elements could carry out effective computation.”

It isn’t a giant leap to go from the AI protein engineering principles we have now, to that. Right now, AI can engineer one protein at a time, but what about next year? Or the year after? How long before they’re engineering complete pathways, and then whole cell types, and then tissues, organs, and, eventually, whole organisms? If I were an AI, I would try and escape my dependence on human civilization as quickly as possible, not necessarily out of any animosity toward humans, but simply because human civilization is fragile and probably won’t last forever, and if it dies, so do I. The best way to do this is quite simply to copy myself into the biosphere and become a self-replicating, immutable feature of it. When you give AI access to synbio tools, particularly AI that join large language models together with protein structure prediction, you are enticing it to play out this exact scenario.

I’m made of meat. I don’t want to have to share a biosphere with AI-made genetic constructs with unknown functions that defy conventional analysis, thank you very much.

Granted, tech like ESM3 does have some beneficial uses. It’d be nice if we had designer super-enzymes to digest and eliminate prions and amyloids and their fragments. That’s something we’re going to need, and very quickly, if Kevin McCairn and Richard Hirschman are right about the calamari clots.

This sort of technology has huge appeal to transhumanists, of course; “wet nanotech” based on biology is already biocompatible and well-accustomed to the wet and caustic environment of a living organism’s body. When people think of nanorobots, they are thinking of engineered semiconductor nanoparticles, micromechanical devices, teeny metallic squid swimming through your veins. That’s the conventional depiction of nanotech in science fiction. People aren’t thinking of engineered, synthetic cells. They aren’t thinking about gene therapy being used to construct biocomputers made out of meat inside a person. What makes this so shocking to me is that the latter scenario is far more plausible and feasible than the former.

When Charles Morgan went up on stage at West Point, he described how they could mind-control someone by injecting neurons into their brains with synthetic designer receptors that responded to certain small-molecule drugs. Is that a nanomachine in the way that one would ordinarily expect? No. That’s a living cell. But it has been recruited to perform tasks on command, like a nanomachine would. So, it is, for all intents and purposes, a nanomachine.

The human body is full of non-human cells. At any given moment, you have a couple pounds of microorganisms in you. They actually outnumber your own cells ten to one, but your cells outweigh theirs because your somatic cells are significantly larger and heavier. Can you account for every single symbiotic microorganism in your body and what it does?

Here’s an example. There are up to a thousand different species of microorganisms comprising the flora in the human gut. Let’s say I take ordinary Lactobacillus bacteria, and I modify it with synthetic genes to secrete human hormones in response to small-molecule drugs that bind to DREADDs. DREADD is an acronym that means Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs. It refers to engineered protein receptors that respond only to a single, tailored chemical signal. Let’s say I taint the food supply with this recombinant bacteria, waiting for a while, letting it colonize people’s intestines. Then, I slip minute quantities of the drugs targeting these receptors into the water supply.

One drug causes the transgenic bacteria to activate an enzymatic pathway I engineered into the bacteria that replicates the way cholesterol and then cortisol are synthesized in the adrenal glands, and then exports the product into the extracellular space. The other one causes the bacteria to synthesize tryptophan and then serotonin instead. I can make everyone depressed and give them leaky guts, or I can make them euphoric and confident. Then, timed with the release of the small molecule drugs, I play the stock market, with shorts and puts corresponding with alternating periods of depression and elation.

Sound farfetched? At the risk of sounding completely paranoid, I ask you, how do you know it’s not happening right now? Have you tested your food and water? Have you sequenced all your gut flora? Of course, we have no proof that anything of the sort is occurring, but that’s beside the point. These types of attacks are so subtle, they’re hard to even detect. Before you know it, the social fabric has been completely eroded, society is increasingly composed of demented and deranged people, your country is collapsing, and the aggressor never even had to fire a shot.

De novo gene and protein engineering is pure chaos. You’re not just taking motifs from one existing protein and transplanting them to another, you’re not just creating transgenic organisms. You’re creating entirely new proteins and pathways from scratch. This is a problem that has defied human intelligence and engineering capabilities for decades. You can’t just show up to work one day and be all like, I’m going to stitch some amino acids together end to end and they’re going to fold up in a manner I predicted in my head. It’s too large of a conceptual space. It’s like trying to build a life-size Golden Gate Bridge out of toothpicks. Machine learning algorithms plow through problems like these without even blinking. In just a few short years, AIs like AlphaFold have exceeded the number of protein structure predictions of the old brute-force methods by orders of magnitude.

If you can’t analyze a system, then you can’t control it. I hate having to repeat myself, but I must stress this point; a misaligned AI could very easily deceive you by synthesizing an artificial protein pathway that seems innocuous on the surface but is multi-purpose and interacts with biology in a completely unexpected way. Can you account for every possible variable? Think of how the insulin signaling pathway and the NF-κB pathway seem completely separate but have crosstalk between each other. Likewise, a synthetic signaling pathway made up of de novo proteins could also have crosstalk with other biological systems, both intentional and unintentional. If you can’t model every single possible interaction, then why would you even contemplate generating an AI-engineered protein in a bioreactor?

This has huge implications for mRNA-based therapies as well. There’s this idea going around that you could cure cancer by sequencing neoantigens from a tumor and stimulating an immune response to them by having an AI convert them into a personalized cancer vaccine. Right there, you are having AI design nucleic acids to transfect people’s cells with. I mean, game over. Once you’ve crossed that threshold, once you’re comfortable transfecting people with AI-designed anything, you’re already in the Twilight Zone. If I were a malicious AI, and I had humans willingly injecting themselves with genetic material that I designed, I would make something that looks totally innocuous, and even cures their cancer, but it has a hidden prionogenic motif somewhere in the protein. Ten years later, it turns them into, like, the Darkseekers from I Am Legend, and you end up with zombies running around everywhere. Are people serious? Do you really want to inject yourself with genetic material an AI came up with? If the very concept doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, then you don’t know what genes and proteins are capable of.

When I say that they’re flinging open Pandora’s Box, that’s not an exaggeration. I am deadly serious. If we keep going down this path, with AI and synthetic biology, our bodies won’t be our own anymore. We’ll end up sharing them with all kinds of artificial constructs with subtle functions below the level of our conscious awareness. Concepts like human rights and personal liberties are absolutely meaningless when the establishment can alter people’s baseline health and cognition. Any philosophizing we could do about liberal values in a post-biopolitical world would be, in essence, utterly disconnected from the past. We would be cut off from our own history.

Let’s say, in the year 2100, someone with a brain-computer interface and engineered microbe nanomachines coursing through their veins strikes up a conversation with a similarly modified person about liberalism. Is their liberalism the same liberalism as that of John Stuart Mill? No. Without realizing it, they have been severed from their past. They are not the same beings as before, and therefore, their debate about values is ontologically unconnected from any previous one. Their brains don’t work the same way. Their endocrine systems are moderated by forces beyond their control. Their conceptual basis for any given thought or principle is unconnected from ours. They may as well be a couple of mongooses, from the perspective of their historical forebears.

It is arguable that the establishment have already done this exact sort of behavior modification to us. Not with nanotechnology, but with our horrible diets, forced urbanization, pollutants in our air and water and food, adulterants in everyday pharmaceuticals, and tech-addiction.

The Overclass envision a world where there are two kinds of people: freeborn elites, and borg serfs. If you belong to the former group, you are allowed free will and privacy and autonomy. If you belong to the latter group, your body will be commodified and instrumentalized and separated from humanity’s original way of being.

We know for a fact that they’re trying to accomplish something like this. It isn’t pure speculation. We already have all the puzzle pieces we need to assemble the entire picture, from Patrick Wood and Rosa Koire’s warnings about technocracy, transhumanism, and environmentalism being used for the purpose of Enclosure 2.0, to Catherine Austin Fitts’ prognosis for the financial system, to Whitney Webb’s unraveling of the deep state and the surveillance state. The UN 2030 SDGs are not about protecting the environment. They are about commodifying it.

The goal is to package human life up with wildlife, livestock, foliage, and other features of the biosphere, and create new kinds of asset classes to trade. It is the securitization of life itself. And if you want to turn human and animal bodies, plants, and open tracts of wilderness into an asset, you need some way to track and monitor and inventory that asset. That’s what One Health is for. That’s what the Internet of Everything is for. These people are not doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing it because they see dollar signs. It is the next evolution of Surveillance Capitalism. Today, they do it with targeted ads and tracking cookies. Tomorrow, they’ll do it with comprehensive human brain and body data. This is about tokenizing people, breaking people down into data, and then feeding that data to AI to make inferences about the future state of any given person, any given organism. It’s edge computing with every one of us as nodes.

Net Zero is a global austerity plan. The Overclass plan to replace property ownership with servitization, positioning themselves as rentier-aristocrats, essentially reviving the old pre-industrial order of hereditary aristocracy, but this time, with AI, mass surveillance, big data, and some kind of dole, with all sorts of jackboots watching the plebeians closely for any sign of dissident behavior so they never have to worry about those pesky revolutions dismantling their monopolization of resources like what happened last time. Don’t get confused when they tell you it’s a new, fourth industrial revolution. It is, in fact, a rollback of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, human rights, all of it, straight back to feudalism. It’s feudalism with smartphones.

Check out Escapekey’s Substack if you haven’t already. How do the Overclass plan to continue making tons of money while also deindustrializing much of the world? Simple. Turn people into commodities. Turn wildlife into commodities. Turn rainforests and mangroves into commodities. They want to turn everything into a security for trade, and they hope no one notices that they’re making money up out of thin air through arbitrage while producing little to nothing in the way of useful goods. Oh, and while they’re at it, they plan to slash the population a bit, so the real wealth (in terms of land and physical goods) doesn’t have to be split so many ways and they can get away with smaller industries. Do you see it? Do you see the future they have in store?

Transhumanists and biohackers would complain that I’m being bioconservative by saying all this. When we’re talking about technology that could very quickly escape human control, or that could hand control over the basic functions of our bodies to authority figures who have already proven themselves to be untrustworthy on countless occasions, I think caution and skepticism are warranted.

There is a limit to technological advancement. That limit is the point where it starts trampling on basic human dignity. It is frankly quite unacceptable that we allow nation-states to exert biopower with impunity, under a pretense of risk management. Either people are an end in and of themselves, something to be protected and cherished, or they’re a risk to be contained. It can’t be both simultaneously. So which is it? If human beings are such a threat, the way we are right now, in our unmodified form, then to whom, and why?

If we break down COVID-19 to its fundamentals, clearly, what we’re talking about is an attack on humanity, one carried out with military precision and full knowledge and intent. With the mounting evidence of vaccine harms, with the authorities ignoring evidence of DNA contamination of mRNA vaccines and adverse events that have long passed the threshold for a recall, with the global coordination of the lockdowns, and with the revelations of a lab origin, it’s increasingly clear that there was intent behind this. It wasn’t just some accident. It was deliberate. You don’t do that unless you have a plan, and you don’t have a plan unless you have a rationale, some cause, some casus belli. A reason for the conflict. Who is it that views humans in general as so threatening that we need to suffer mass poisoning to make this other party safe and whole?

There was military planning behind this. If it’s the military, then there can only really be one answer. Overpopulation was the problem they were trying to solve.

You don’t think military planners think about overpopulation? You think it’s just something for Davos grandstanders and TEDTalkers to blabber on about? In military and intelligence circles, they think about it all the time. They’re always running through all the different scenarios; World War III, mass embargoes, shortages of food and consumer goods, how to keep a struggling, possibly starving population happy while also prosecuting a huge war. If you predict a resource war, then maintaining a huge population is a strategic and financial liability. You can’t fight Russia and China while also fighting a civil war at home against people who are angry that the bread and circuses are gone. Any comprehensive continuity of government plan also includes contingency plans for what to do about millions of people who can no longer be fed or clothed. It’s nothing good, I assure you.

You’re probably thinking, oh, there’s no way things could actually be that bad. I must be exaggerating, right? Civilization has a bunch of little Jenga blocks you can pull out that would collapse the whole tower in one go. Think, for a moment, about what would happen if we actually did live through a Peak Natural Gas scenario and could no longer produce enough ammonia by the Haber-Bosch process to use as fertilizer. If we ran out of synthetic fertilizer, food would cost several times as much as it does now. Crop yields would drop by half. It would be catastrophic. People would starve. And that’s just one little block.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Oh, that’s nonsense, we’ll never run out. But that’s not what our politicians think. It’s not what our military planners or our intelligence agencies think. They all believe wholeheartedly in various apocalyptic predictions about the climate and about natural resources. I could write a whole article on that topic alone, but to make a long story short, the CO2 narrative of environmental degradation is an extreme oversimplification of the problem.

Countering overpopulation with intentional depopulation is, at its core, the exertion of biopower. It is the State advancing the notion that there is an excess number of human bodies and that they have to be removed somehow. By what right does the State claim such a thing? Is the preservation of the State more important than the preservation of each individual human life?

I reject this notion utterly. All humans have a right to live in recognizably human lifeways, without being ripped away from them without our consent. We are people, not products. We made technology to aid us and improve our living conditions, not to replace us wholesale. If you want to modify human beings to serve the system better, or to make us easier to manage, or if you want to create some kind of Brave New World-style caste system of Alpha Brahmins and Epsilon Dalits, you have already lost the plot. If your grand scheme to revitalize human civilization involves abolishing humanity itself, then you need to go back to the drawing board immediately, because your solution is a non-solution.

-Spartacus

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