Evolution happens blindingly fast for viruses, which means that humans can co-opt it. Are you really confident that the combination of directed evolution and some centralised design won’t reach devastating results? After all, the deadliness, incubation period and transmissibility are already out there in nature; it would just be a question of putting the pieces together.
After all, the deadliness, incubation period and transmissibility are already out there in nature; it would just be a question of putting the pieces together.
There are tradeoffs between those three. E.g. the recent “airborne H5N1” experiments produced airborne transmission at the expense of almost all deadliness.
However, there are very nasty things that could be done by bypassing the normal fitness landscape that would let a less-lethal variant outcompete a more-lethal variant (providing immunity to survivors against more lethal variants) to directly produce numerous deadly viruses acting on different mechanisms so that immunity to one does not protect against the others.
Again, as with nukes I would say the x-risk potential looks a lot smaller than the catastrophic risk potential, but not negligible.
I think the attitudes of most experts are shaped by the limits of what they can actually do today, which is why they tend not to be that worried about it. The risk will rise over time as our biotech abilities improve, but realistically a biological xrisk is at least a decade or two in the future. How serious the risk becomes will depend on what happens with regulation and defensive technologies between now and then.
Evolution happens blindingly fast for viruses, which means that humans can co-opt it. Are you really confident that the combination of directed evolution and some centralised design won’t reach devastating results? After all, the deadliness, incubation period and transmissibility are already out there in nature; it would just be a question of putting the pieces together.
There are tradeoffs between those three. E.g. the recent “airborne H5N1” experiments produced airborne transmission at the expense of almost all deadliness.
However, there are very nasty things that could be done by bypassing the normal fitness landscape that would let a less-lethal variant outcompete a more-lethal variant (providing immunity to survivors against more lethal variants) to directly produce numerous deadly viruses acting on different mechanisms so that immunity to one does not protect against the others.
Again, as with nukes I would say the x-risk potential looks a lot smaller than the catastrophic risk potential, but not negligible.
Exactly.
I think the attitudes of most experts are shaped by the limits of what they can actually do today, which is why they tend not to be that worried about it. The risk will rise over time as our biotech abilities improve, but realistically a biological xrisk is at least a decade or two in the future. How serious the risk becomes will depend on what happens with regulation and defensive technologies between now and then.