I thought this was a great article raising a bunch of points which I hadn’t previously come across, thanks for writing it!
Regarding the risk from non-state actors with extensive resources, one key question is how competent we expect such groups to be. Gwern suggests that terrorists are currently not very effective at killing people or inducing terror—with similar resources, it should be possible to induce far more damage than they actually do. This has somewhat lowered my concern about bioterrorist attacks, especially when considering that successfully causing a global pandemic worse than natural ones is not easy. (Lowered my concern in relative terms that is—I still think this risk is unacceptably high and prevention measures should be taken. I don’t want to rely on terrorists being incompetent.) This suggests both that terrorist groups may not pursue bioterrorism even if it were the best way to achieve their goals and that they may not be able to execute well on such a difficult task. Hence, without having thought about it too much, I think I might rate the risks from non-state actors somewhat lower than you do (though I’m not sure, especially since you don’t give numerical estimates—which is totally reasonable). For instance, I’m not sure whether we should expect risks of GCBRs caused by non-state actors to be higher than risks of GCBRs caused by state actors (as you suggest).
I thought this was a great article raising a bunch of points which I hadn’t previously come across, thanks for writing it!
Regarding the risk from non-state actors with extensive resources, one key question is how competent we expect such groups to be. Gwern suggests that terrorists are currently not very effective at killing people or inducing terror—with similar resources, it should be possible to induce far more damage than they actually do. This has somewhat lowered my concern about bioterrorist attacks, especially when considering that successfully causing a global pandemic worse than natural ones is not easy. (Lowered my concern in relative terms that is—I still think this risk is unacceptably high and prevention measures should be taken. I don’t want to rely on terrorists being incompetent.) This suggests both that terrorist groups may not pursue bioterrorism even if it were the best way to achieve their goals and that they may not be able to execute well on such a difficult task. Hence, without having thought about it too much, I think I might rate the risks from non-state actors somewhat lower than you do (though I’m not sure, especially since you don’t give numerical estimates—which is totally reasonable). For instance, I’m not sure whether we should expect risks of GCBRs caused by non-state actors to be higher than risks of GCBRs caused by state actors (as you suggest).