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.’
Takes like this are one of the many things I pull out to point out how naive and misguided most x-risk obsessive people are. And especially Mr. Altman.
Despite wide fears of synthetic gain of function attacks, as it turns out, it’s actually really hard to create a new virus meaningfully stronger than the standard endemic ones that already exist. Many countries and labs have legitimately tried. Lots of papers and research. It’s, really really hard to beat nature at the microbiological scale; Viruses have to not only be virulent, but it has to contend with extremely unpredictable intermediate environments. The current endemic viruses got there through many mutations and adaptations inside environments that they were already at least successful (and not in vitro). And in the end, what would be the point? Once a virulent virus breaks out, you have very little control. Either it works really well and backfires or, even far more likely, it doesn’t do that much at all, but it does piss other nations off.
It’s not impossible. But honestly, yeah, I don’t comprehend x-riskers who obsess over this.
How dare you! Eternal torture in Virokos basilisk for you!
A second minor side point which shows you are prob right on this front, and which broadens it from the risks of biological warfare (which I would argue would be the reason to do research to this) are low to the risk from biological warfare and chemical warfare are low: Soldiers have beards again.
Now I know, that sound absolutely crazy as an argument. But iirc the reason soldiers were no longer allowed beards around the world wars era was due to gasmask (the pandemic also showed that facial hair make fitting masks hard). But nowadays beards are more and more allowed (and in the case of authoritarian militaristic societies a sign of their elite special forces ;) ))
To me this shows that at least on the military level they don’t really worry about the risks of artificial (wait, why do they say synthetic? Wouldn’t artificial be a better word? Is this some sort of signaling thing? Anyway) viral attacks in the near future.
But I could be wrong, just found it interesting, and somewhere some military theorist is prob screaming after reading this, this close to warthunderforuming this place.