Thanks for writing this, and mentioning my related post, Jeff!
The technological change is the continuing decrease in the knowledge, talent, motivation, and resources necessary to create a globally catastrophic pandemic.
I think this depends on how fast safety measures like the ones you mentioned are adopted, and how the offense-defence balance evolves with technological progress. It would be great if Open Phil released the results of their efforts to quantify biorisk, whose one of the aims was:
Enumerating possible ‘phase transitions’ that would cause a radical departure from relevant historical base rates, e.g. total collapse of the taboo on biological weapons, such that they become a normal part of military doctrine.
Update on December 3. There plans plans to publish the results:
I worked on a project for Open Phil quantifying the likely number of terrorist groups pursuing bioweapons over the next 30 years, but didn’t look specifically at attack magnitudes (I appreciate the push to get a public-facing version of the report published—I’m on it!).
Thanks for writing this, and mentioning my related post, Jeff!
I think this depends on how fast safety measures like the ones you mentioned are adopted, and how the offense-defence balance evolves with technological progress. It would be great if Open Phil released the results of their efforts to quantify biorisk, whose one of the aims was:
Update on December 3. There plans plans to publish the results: