> And to be quite honest, the prospect of a massive biotech revolution is downright scary rather than exciting to me because AI might be able to convince a teenager to shoot up a school now and then, but, say, generally-available protein synthesis capability means nutters could print their own prions.
Yep this type of pandora's box is scary. Our culture demonstrably has no good mechanism for dealing with these kinds of existential risks.
Humans are fortunate that nuclear weapons turned out to be very difficult and expensive to build even with the theory widely known. If they were something anyone with an internet connection could create we would probably be extinct by now. There is absolutely no guarantee that future developments will have similar restrictions.
If bio-engineering gets accessible enough that any random motivated individual can create a new super bug we're pretty much doomed. Seems like something to worry about!
Yep this type of pandora's box is scary. Our culture demonstrably has no good mechanism for dealing with these kinds of existential risks.
Humans are fortunate that nuclear weapons turned out to be very difficult and expensive to build even with the theory widely known. If they were something anyone with an internet connection could create we would probably be extinct by now. There is absolutely no guarantee that future developments will have similar restrictions.
If bio-engineering gets accessible enough that any random motivated individual can create a new super bug we're pretty much doomed. Seems like something to worry about!