Engineering the Apocalypse - Sam Harris w/ Rob Reid

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The title is a bit sensational but I get Rob's point - ie. if someone had tinkered with H5N1 for longer symptom-free gestation, higher transmissibility, and let it lose we could be etching our memory of it on stone monuments.

The upshot (and it's long - about 4 hours where part of each our is Rob's discussion series, the other part is Sam and Rob discussing) is the question of what regulation looks like to help prevent ever cheapening synthetic biology tech from turning into something that either suicidal loan wolf mass murders or antihuman ideological adherents could use in order to end human civilization.

https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras ... pocalypse/

Rob actually had a TED talk a while back where he considered that if we ramped this up effectively it would mean that we'd also have this technology distributed to pharmacies and the generations of vaccines could even be something happening at the specific pharmacy locations, which means much more rapid response - potentially - than simply waiting for something to be centrally distributed. The trouble here though, we might very well be heading into an age of genome hacking viruses where a person could, in theory, not only design pathogens to be extra-challenging in terms of containment but set it up to where the vaccines themselves would need to do almost intolerable damage to be effective.

Something else Rob mentioned in that TED talk, I'm only half way through so he may get to it later, we need to figure out how to cut down on human misery to such a degree that far fewer people are in enough pain to want to do that sort of thing. I think this is a case where our technology effectively boycotts the way we've been doing things, ie. social-Darwinian formats of free market for survival, because the pressures and agonies needed to keep compression on that sort of system will become untenable considering the risks.

Don't forget: with genome editing techniques comes the potential for genome specific viruses. How about a virus that only causes morbidity in people with certain genes, like, say, for black skin, or some of the specific genes minority groups developed over centuries, like you can find with Ashkenazi Jewish people..... Imagine the Chinese government, thinking about what to do with its Uyghur population, which likely has a few genetic markers different from Han Chinese...