Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
this kind of keyword searching (sometimes via a discord bot or similar for coordination purposes) is ridiculously common — old r/SneerClub was an interesting Petri dish for it, cause you’d get accounts that only post about Urbit or on TheMotte every couple months barging into a SneerClub thread for the first time going “uhhh can you prove to me, whoever the fuck I am, that these people are fascists though?” and it was painfully obvious to everyone else what they were trying to do
It seems insane to me, but I used to do some useless shit online so I guess I shouldn’t find it so odd.