A bit tangential, but this raises an important point: in general, youโre looking for things that raise the bar for causing harm. If you can take smallpox synthesis from something where anyone who works in a lab with a benchtop can synthesize it without even opening in the machine to one where they would have to disassemble it, but that already increases the chance that someone else in the lab would notice.
It would be great to get to a place where we have systems that will provide reliable protection even from well-funded state actors, but (a) a lot of the risk comes from much easier cases like it becoming easier for an individual to cause harm and (b) we are so far from having that kind of protection that efforts to improve the situation there should be much lower priority than ones that handle the easier cases.
A bit tangential, but this raises an important point: in general, youโre looking for things that raise the bar for causing harm. If you can take smallpox synthesis from something where anyone who works in a lab with a benchtop can synthesize it without even opening in the machine to one where they would have to disassemble it, but that already increases the chance that someone else in the lab would notice.
It would be great to get to a place where we have systems that will provide reliable protection even from well-funded state actors, but (a) a lot of the risk comes from much easier cases like it becoming easier for an individual to cause harm and (b) we are so far from having that kind of protection that efforts to improve the situation there should be much lower priority than ones that handle the easier cases.