Sentinel minutes for week #50/2024: Mirror life

Sentinel status: Greenish 🟢

Top item: Scientists have called for research with the goal of creating mirror life to be banned, which could cause “unprecedented and irreversible harm”. All members of our Sentinel forecasting team agree with this recommendation.

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Mirror life

In a recent 299 page report (summary), an international group of Nobel laureates and other experts have called for a ban on research to create mirror life:

All known life is homochiral. DNA and RNA are made from “right-handed” nucleotides, and proteins are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Driven by curiosity and plausible applications, some researchers had begun work toward creating lifeforms composed entirely of mirror-image biological molecules. Such mirror organisms would constitute a radical departure from known life, and their creation warrants careful consideration. The capability to create mirror life is likely at least a decade away and would require large investments and major technical advances

The authors write about the severe risks of creating mirror life, which could pose a risk of a major global catastrophe:

Our analysis suggests that mirror bacteria would likely evade many immune mechanisms mediated by chiral molecules, potentially causing lethal infection in humans, animals, and plants. They are likely to evade predation from natural-chirality phage and many other predators, facilitating spread in the environment. We cannot rule out a scenario in which a mirror bacterium acts as an invasive species across many ecosystems, causing pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans. Even a mirror bacterium with a narrower host range and the ability to invade only a limited set of ecosystems could still cause unprecedented and irreversible harm.

They add that foreseeable benefits of creating mirror life are limited, and that these cannot justify the potential risks associated with creating mirror life.

All members of our Sentinel forecasting team agreed that research to create mirror life should be banned, though some members are uncertain about the extent to which they would pose an existential risk. For instance, maybe antibodies would be able to defend against mirror bacteria after all, or maybe by the time we have the technology to create mirror bacteria, we’d also have the technology to develop some countermeasures

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In the US, a child in California previously diagnosed with H5N1 flu became sick after drinking raw milk, and the virus that infected the child most closely resembled H5N1 flu found in cattle. Two more human cases were reported in California, and another in Louisiana, in a person who had had contact with sick and dead birds.

UK considering ring-vaccination campaign to tackle new mpox outbreak if more cases emerge.

A Moroccan company has started producing mpox tests for $5.

Geopolitics

Middle East

After the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, many are wondering how Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) will govern. The New York Times looked at how it governed Idlib before: fairly efficiently, allowing for local autonomy, and putting in place conservative Muslim rules, but tolerating much more freedom than other groups. One question is how well HTS will be able to scale up its rule to the country as a whole and bring stability to the country. Another question is to what extent Kurdish northern areas bordering Turkey will eventually be brought under its control.

Israel used the opportunity to take Syrian territory along its border and destroy Syrian military assets.

Russia is in contact with HTS to try to negotiate continued use of its military bases in Syria, but it is possible that it may permanently lose access to those bases. It is likely that Russia will increase its military presence in areas of Libya controlled by the Haftar family, and deepen its ties to the Haftar family—and it is likely that the Haftars will now exact a higher price. In the short term, some Russian operations in Africa could be more difficult to carry out,

Russia appears to be moving some of its assets out of Syria: satellite imagery shows military equipment being dismantled and transport movements at Hmeimim airbase and Tartus naval base. Videos show Russian ground vehicles travelling across the country. This is despite efforts by Russia to negotiate a deal with the new government, and imagery from earlier in the week suggesting no signs of a withdrawal from these bases.

More than three million Syrian refugees living in Turkey are deciding whether to return home to Syria.

The collapse of the Assad regime is also causing turmoil and some amount of instability in Iran. Officials and ordinary citizens are openly questioning whether Iran's support of the Syrian regime was worth the cost. Our forecasting team estimated a 13% probability that the Iranian government will fall by the end of 2025 (range: 8% to 25%). Forecasters pointed at the high rate of Mosque closure and at the increased likelihood of regime change after failed foreign adventurism.

We also forecasted the probability that the US will cause more than 20 Iranian military fatalities on Iranian soil by the end of 2025, with an aggregate estimate also of 13% (range: 4% to 20%). On the outside-view level, the two cases we could identify since 1979 were the Iranian Air Flight 655 and Operation Praying Mantis; the killing of Qasem Soleimani only reached 10 fatalities. And on the inside view level, Trump's team has been considering launching airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites, which could potentially cause more than 20 military fatalities. But the discussions are at an "early stage", only involve "some" members of the transition team, and one option is to just outsource the deed to Israel by providing them with bunker-busting bombs.

The Palestinian Authority is raiding the Jenin refugee camp and fighting the Jenin Brigades.

An article in Haaretz openly talks about Israel’s nuclear program, in a shift from Israel’s official stance of “strategic ambiguity”

Syria rebels name a transitional prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir. The new Syrian government has pledged to govern with more virtue than Assad.

Israel arrested 30 people who Iran was paying for spying and sabotage tasks.

World Central Kitchen suspends Gaza operations after staff killed.

Large-scale protests occur in Manbij, Aleppo Governorate, Syria, against pro-Turkish militias. Turkey is also taking more territory in Syria.

Europe

The Biden administration announced almost $1B additional longer-term funding for weapons for Ukraine, and gave $20bn to Kyiv funded by seized Russian assets.

Several European countries paused decisions on asylum applications by people from Syria.

Russia praised Donald Trump for opposing Ukraine's use of Western long-range missiles on Russian territory. Trump also said that Ukraine should probably expect less support in the future, but also wrote on his social media platform that Zelensky is interested in making a deal and appears to blame Putin for the death of hundreds of thousands of Russians. He also reportedly expressed support for European troops enforcing a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Belarus’s president Lukashenko confirms that nuclear weapons are stationed in Belarus.

Putin states that its intermediate-range missile system, the Oreshnik minimizes the need for using nuclear weapons.

Drone struck a UN vehicle on the way to inspect a Ukrainian nuclear plant.

The Russian Federal Security Service arrested a German-Russian man for alleged sabotage in Russia

East Asia

High levels of Chinese military activity were observed around Taiwan for several days. China neither confirmed nor denied carrying out military exercises. The actions bore some resemblance to an actual blockade. This is likely an attempt to intimidate the new President of Taiwan and send a signal to the incoming US Administration that outside powers cannot prevent China from cutting off Taiwan. In response to those drills, Taiwan opened—but has now closed—their emergency response centre.

US Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander, US Indo-Pacific Command, recently stated, "I remain confident that we’d prevail in a conflict with the PRC over Taiwan," but expressed "concern... that the margin — expressed in risk of succeeding, lost lives, lost capability, lost money, and lost time — is eroding.”

As @InsiderGeo points out on X, China's other long game in the region is domination over the South China Sea for control over almost one third of global trade, large oil and gas reserves, and productive fishing zones.

The results of a wargame found that a further build-up of US nuclear capabilities would have no effect on whether China resorts to using nuclear weapons in a war over Taiwan.

NK is saber rattling, perhaps foreshadowing a possible nuclear test in the next few months.

The Americas

In the US, a man who is both a Chinese citizen and a US permanent resident was arrested by the FBI for flying a drone over and taking pictures of Vandenberg Space Force Base.

A US court has rejected TikTok’s request to temporarily halt its pending US ban.

Other

The Arakan Army now controls the Myanmar/Bangladesh border.

An air strike on a market killed over 100 in Sudan.

Artificial Intelligence

Google DeepMind announced its Gemini 2.0 series of models, the most powerful language based AI systems they have developed, launching Gemini 2.0 Flash, which performs better than Gemini 1.5 Pro, and is faster and cheaper to run.

OpenAI launched Sora, their text-to-video model.

OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji was found dead inside his apartment. It was determined by San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner that there was no foul play involved. It has been reported that information Balaji held was “expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company”:

Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world

Zvi Mowshowitz pointed out that o1’s system card is not about o1.

Or rather, we don’t actually have a proper o1 system card, aside from the outside red teaming reports. At all.

Because, as I realized after writing my first draft of this, the data here does not reflect the o1 model they released, or o1 pro?

I think what happened is pretty bad on multiple levels.

1. The failure to properly communicate the information they did provide.

2. The failure to provide the correct information.

3. The failure, potentially, to actually test the same model they released, in many of the ways we are counting on to ensure the model is safe to release.

4. The failure to properly elicit model capabilities. o1 scores unreasonably poorly on a large portion of the preparedness tests, to the point where I would not take the tests seriously as assessments of what o1 is capable of doing, even at a weaker previous checkpoint.

5. That’s all about not using o1. Then there’s o1 pro.

6. Whereas the METR evaluation, presumably using final o1, was rather scary.

OpenAI has released a series of emails which show that Elon Musk had wanted the company to have a for-profit structure back in 2017. You can read the full released email archives here.

Meta is calling for California’s attorney general to block OpenAI’s planned conversion into a for-profit company.

China is setting up an AI standards committee. The committee is to focus on developing industry standards in areas such as LLMs and AI risk assessment.

Amazon is donating $1M to Trump’s inaugural fund, to air the event on Prime Video, and Trump is set to meet with Jeff Bezos.

The US has finalized over $6.1B in funding for Micron under the CHIPS Act.

China introduced a spherical police robot capable of rolling at speeds up to 35 mph, operating on land or in water, and casting a net over a person being pursued. It can operate autonomously or with a controller.

Quantum Computing

Google researchers have achieved a milestone in quantum computing by substantially reducing error in their new quantum chip, Willow. They do so by getting the error in each qubit down, combining several qubits into a “logical qubits”, and applying various error correction mechanisms.

In contrast with the enthusiasm generated by the announcement, we checked in with Pablo Moreno, who described progress as being pretty much in line with expectations, and cautioned that “I strongly believe (non-ground state) chemistry and material science is the only area where quantum computing will have a commercially relevant advantage in the next 10 to 15 years.”

In the background, one worrying possibility is that quantum computers could be used to break asymmetric encryption algorithms, including those currently used to secure internet traffic and national security information. In response, post quantum cryptography (PQC) protocols are being developed in preparation for the arrival of cryptanalytically relevant quantum computers, which are generally expected to be developed by the 2030s at the earliest.

Alphabet shares jumped 6%, though this is confounded by the announcement of Gemini 2.0.

Climate

An article in The Conversation discusses a self-reinforcing "doom loop" of climate change and political instability: political instability diverts attention from addressing climate change, and worsening climate change increases political instability. One way in which climate change affects political stability is by causing inflation, e.g., by increasing food prices, reducing labor productivity, and disrupting supply chains. The authors note that, "extreme weather in 2022 alone is estimated to have added nearly 1% to food inflation in Europe, while as much as a third of recent UK food inflation is estimated to come from climate impacts."

Sui generis

We previously discussed mystery drones spotted over US airbases in the UK, now some have been reported over US air bases and industrial sites in Germany.