Casey Handmer

Casey Handmer ✓ @CJHandmer Follow Having spent much of my adult life around people like this, it's something that's basically never discussed. You end up forming ad hoc communities from people who have climbed as high as they can in search of other people like them. Certain companies, technical universities, etc. But even then certain facts become evident. 1. Anyone who is far enough down the curve to have nothing in common with their spawn cohort has essentially nothing in common with any other living human, except that isolation. It's like the Star Wars cantina. 2. Ability is still extremely power law distributed. Our OP here could easily find himself in between a conversation between two IQ 160 types, and realize that once you're on the concave upwards part of the curve, there is no cluster of "people like me", just an ever thinning set of next level geniuses who can do in an afternoon what might take me 5 years. If they could be bothered. 3. AI is changing this to an extent.

**Casey Handmer** @CJHandmer 2025-07-13 The pearl clutching from mostly non technical AI people who are nowhere near the frontier on AI safety auditing seems crazy to me. First of all, anyone who is in the socio-technical class where these systems are developed could easily develop eg bioweapons or other WMDs with access to a library. Where do you think the Navy Research Lab or the Manhattan Project recruits from? Second, as a cursory Google search will tell you, the tools necessary to do nasty bioweapon stuff in particular are mostly unregulated and publicly available, as in you can buy a DIY CRISPR kit and build a wet lab for new MacBook money. Trading determination and IQ for time, transgenic tech has been accessible to hobbyists since about 1990. (Don't) Ask me how I know. Third, anyone in the potential super weapons recruiting pool is perceptive enough to know that civilization is susceptible to literally thousands of vulnerabilities, and that 99% of prevention efforts from regulation to surveillance to auditing to the TSA is ineffective security theatre. Fourth, despite this all being true, the equilibrium is demonstrably (modulo the weak anthropic principle lol) that Without Loss of Generality IQ 140+ super autistes don't want to destroy the world/hijack planes/rob banks/build incomprehensible super weapons in their garage, they're mostly building and maintaining infrastructure and incrementing global GDP. Indeed when a bioweapon actually did escape containment and kill millions of people, where did it originate? US biosafety-funded research laundered past US bioethics laws in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The screams are coming from inside the house! Fifth, there are exponentially more subtle and effective hacks available to high capability people, AIs, and hybrid systems, so much so that I've never read any audit on any system card that I thought was more likely to be effective than some primitive tribe building an airport out of bamboo to attract cargo. Nearly all of these hacks are of course legal by default, many of them generate transformational wealth and drive our civilization forward, if we have the wherewithall to allow them to exist. Sixth, as we have now seen on multiple occasions, "AI safety" is the preferred vector for deeply anti-humanist fanatics to gain adversarial access to and power within organizations developing AI, leading to ridiculous and sinister spectacles such as Gemini's blatant historical revisionism. Obviously many of the people working on this are well intentioned but the collective outcome of their effort is as useful and undeniable as the outcome of NASA's thousands of man-years of effort on Shuttle safety when Columbia burned up. It has been obvious enough to me for years that this movement is primarily the source of, rather than the solution to, existential hazards to humanity from AI. I am encouraged that @xAI has the discipline and courage to delete this so-called feature. > 2025-07-13 > > What's in a system card? For one, dangerous capabilities (DC) evals. These measure how well the model can assist with tasks that could pose a national security threat (like hacking or synthesizing bioweapons). E.g. these are the bio DC evals reported in the Claude 4 system card. > > [image] --- **Casey Handmer** @CJHandmer [2025-07-14](https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1944647626017898542) And yes, this worries me far more than uncreative people hammering "repeat after me" into Grok in some bizarre and hopeless effort to get clout and/or clicks. These people would go to a hardware store, deliberately hit themselves with a hammer, then insist that Home Depot hire --- **Arthur B.** @ArthurB [2025-07-14](https://x.com/ArthurB/status/1944649169534439647) "Fourth, despite this all being true, the equilibrium is demonstrably (modulo the weak anthropic principle lol) that Without Loss of Generality IQ 140+ super autistes don't want to destroy the world." What happens when all the vulnerabilities easily seen and actionable by IQ --- **Casey Handmer** @CJHandmer [2025-07-14](https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1944650121125429547) They are and have been forever. We took our shoes off at airports for two decades because some guy, who I will charitably describe as not very clever, tried to get a shoe bomb onto a plane. You don't have to be that good at math to realize he was more successful in failure than --- **Nick Foley** @nhfoley [2025-07-14](https://x.com/nhfoley/status/1944761906981376117) Nuclear & chemical weapon plans better than any AI so far lived freely on the 90’s internet, yet here we are, safe from that hazard. From a POSIWID view (they’d deny with zeal), AI Safety is HR+PR - corporate defense for when the tools are involved in some future catastrophe. --- **Casey Handmer** @CJHandmer [2025-07-14](https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1944770432135315790) Whoops. --- **Ely Rabani #GazaTruceNow** @radsci [2025-07-14](https://x.com/radsci/status/1944800083058573368) It’s exactly the fact that people capable enough to pull off clandestine WMD production have the intelligence to find better things to do which makes them the wrong reference point. The issue is giving people manifesting impaired reasoning to societally beneficial goals narrow domain force multiplication (specifically with minimal chance of detection). FleetingBits @fleetingbits I don't really understand the argument. AI models either will offer: (1) much greater biocapabilities or (2) democratize biocapabilities or (3) both. And, on short timelines, it's good if people take basic steps now.