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The good news is that bioweapons can’t kill everyone. A handful of percent will remain to repopulate the Earth.
Nukes also cannot kill everyone. Nuclear winter was proven to not be based on solid evidence, the earth remains very habitable after all nukes have gone off.
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And one wouldn't make one from mRNA. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Still: the difficulty isn't comparable to EUV machines or refining uranium and does not form a comfortable security barrier.
I generally agree -- the actual risk is from serious/state actors, and for those, the barriers are not high. I'm just saying that people are focused on the wrong problem because they've got LLM-brain.
The people "got LLM-brain" are saying: "Wow those barriers are coming down fast"
And you're saying: "There are still barriers"
Both are true, but only one is helpful for thinking about the future. The other is hardly even helpful for thinking about the present, and I've never seen a quasi-intelligent person do it in lieu of some other motivations in their reasoning.
AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.
A lot of things could be an existential threat, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, climate change, the end of the Flynn effect, cratering birth rates, whatever.
You can always pick out a particularly dystopian vision of the future if you're so inclined. The doom narrative is sells ad revenue, so it's a huge amount of what we all consume online, but it's not really that mapped out to reality...
Somethings get worse, some things get better, in general, the average QoL for the average human is getting better. If we decide not to go to global thermonuclear war, or we decide to unplug any killer AIs that we invent, we'll probably be ok. If we can reduce the population to 3,000-ish humans after the Toba eruption, we can probably survive whatever self-imposed calamities we can create.
I think there's something particularly noxious about the present nihilism trend I see in a lot of this doom themed content. People should go outside and touch grass.
The regulation at the DNA Printer level works I think, as long as nobody invents a good at home DNA printer, but if they do that there is no need for custom viruses, somebody can take an existing one that is known to be deadly and just print it.
I will kickstart a home DNA printer
I will name it Torment Nexus
I will be rich
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If that's the understanding you came away with, it was clarified in my immediately following comment. Glad we agree that there are labs that will solve very hard parts of creating a novel virus, either by accident or by negligence.
It was dishonest then for you to imply that readily accessible commercial labs didn't take reasonable precautions and it's dishonest now , too.
Here's a red team exercise where researchers successfully bought fragments of the best known pathogen in the world, never mind a novel one.
What reasonable precautions failed to catch this but we could expect to catch a novel virus that "kinda looks like" a known virus?
https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/08/shouldnt-be-easy-buy-syn...
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Nukes also cannot kill everyone. Nuclear winter was proven to not be based on solid evidence, the earth remains very habitable after all nukes have gone off.
Show me that proof please. So far the counter evidence has not been convincing. FWIW I don’t think nuclear war will annihilate us. But it won’t be pleasant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#Likelihood_o...
Annie Jacobsen is awesome, her book about Area 51 was riveting, but I also cannot unsee "Capitalist Realism" and the idea that we keep picturing civilization-ending catastrophes because we don't want to go to work in the morning, and walking/biking everywhere and living in a small community is amazingly appealing to us at a base level. We yearn for the lifestyle of the apocalypse survivor, but none of us want to go through the apocalypse. Generally, I think we kind of say, "oh, it'll be the end of the world" because most of us (myself included) lack the imagination to really look beyond linear extrapolations of the status quo most of the time.
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There’s YouTubers who do this [0]. I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high - [0] https://youtu.be/aoczYXJeMY4?is=OqObeGzZB6AKL0Jk
“There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” But the next one (or the first one, if that one wasn’t manmade) will probably be much worse.
I feel like we are all somehow memoryhole-ing this massive trauma that nothing in this batshit era makes any sense without remembering.
Specifically, I wonder if the thirst for a machine god has anything to do with the activation of the Rapture narrative in the collective unconscious, which we then empower by forgetting its trigger. Call Joseph Campbell
The regulation at the DNA Printer level works I think, as long as nobody invents a good at home DNA printer, but if they do that there is no need for custom viruses, somebody can take an existing one that is known to be deadly and just print it.
That’s what I’m thinking. If we can restrict EUV technology to the West then why can’t we restrict DNA manufacturing? Not to the West in this case but to capable governments like with Nuclear power.
EUV is the pinnacle of a highly advanced supply chain, you could clone it but it requires many billions of dollars of R&D and massively specialized components; an economy like China likely can support the manufacturing tree required.
I would not be surprised if DNA printers seem end up closer to EUV or even more commoditized, if they are an extension of how all pharma/biotech manufacturing and research gets done.
But this is ultimately contingent on what the technology tree looks like. You couldn’t prevent diffusion of 3D printed ghost guns, even if you wanted to.
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Having recently read both of Annie Jacobsen’s books — _Nuclear War_ and _Biological War_ — I’m much more concerned about a bioweapon than a nuclear one. Her conclusion to the latter book comes out and says it, paraphrasing here: > Nuclear war is terrifying in its destruction, but the chain of command limits the risk of a rogue actor. Whereas bio weapons can be designed and manufactured in relatively low tech environm…
The good news is that bioweapons can’t kill everyone. A handful of percent will remain to repopulate the Earth.