Currently: Head of AI Research at SecureBio
Previously: Biosecurity roadmapping (focus on built-environment disinfection via far-UVC) at Convergent Research. Finishing a virology PhD on clinical sequencing, diversity, and evolution of DNA viruses in the transplant setting.
Also ran EA Osnabrück and Hannover from 2015–2022. Cultivating a wide range of EA-related interests, including welfare bio, metaethics, progress studies, and many more.
All posts and comments are in purely personal capacity.
Great to see the preprint! Kevin Esvelt also explains the approach in his EAG Boston 2023 talk (starting around 20min):
No wonder Bulby is unhappy; they’re missing a good chunk of their head!
Thanks for digging into the repo
Does somebody have the image file of the sensitive, sentient lightbulb that visited the forum dropdown menu two days ago?
That’s really sad to hear! Given the number of events hosted there and the renting costs of alternative venues, it seemed like a solid investment (while also being much more picturesque, of course). So, I’m also hoping for a post-mortem with more details.
I’m personally not that worried about substitution risks. Roughly: The deterrence aspect is strongest for low-resource threat actors and—from a tail-risk perspective—bio is probably the most dangerous thing they can utilize, with that pesky self-replication and whatnot.
Hi Sean,
Thanks for the write-up and opening the discussion. I agree that material degradation is something that should be thoroughly investigated. Caveat: I’m not a polymer engineer and have read/seen a few papers/talks on the topic, but I’m by no means deeply familiar with all the material types, etc.
Re. the Boeing study (working link, btw): The study used fairly low doses per disinfection cycle but simulated 25 years of service, totalling >108 J/cm² of far-UV exposure. Still just about a third of the bus study exposure, but already in the dose range where the bus study measured only marginal effects of additional far-UV on colour or mechanical properties.
Still, I don’t find myself overly worried (but again, not an expert and I also don’t have regulator-brain, so interpret this accordingly).
Far-UV doesn’t penetrate deeply and will likely not affect the mechanical properties of solid plastic objects. The bus study found effects in thin sheets of fibre-reinforced materials (in some directions), and I don’t doubt that, but in what situations is a 10% decrease in failure strength of thin polymer layers that relevant for consumers or regulators? I genuinely don’t know, and there might be specific circumstances in which parts must be replaced more frequently, or the plastic type needs to be switched, but I don’t think this will matter a lot in most settings. E.g., Boeing found “no adverse impact on the mechanical properties of thermoplastic and textile materials” in the airplane setting at the dose where the bus study already saw decreased tensile strength. I’m very interested in hearing counterexamples, though!
But ultimately, both Boeing and the bus study have only tested the materials present in those surroundings. Looking around in my office or the office of friends, I’m not sure how many of the materials overlap. There’s some testing behind closed doors from lamp manufacturers, but no public database of common materials and the impact of far-UV on them. We eventually want and need such a database to make the far-UV implementation as pain- and seamless as possible for building operators, etc., but I’m not sure how much the average office worker or regulator cares if the back cover of their monitors starts yellowing faster (like you said, open question: Market research opportunity!).
And in the beachhead markets for far-UV (long-term care homes, ICUs), the cost–benefit calculus is favouring far-UV so much that a premium for far-UV coatings will happily be paid if yellowing is even something they care about. And the plethora of single-use plastics are not affected.
While I moved away from the wetlab during my virology PhD and dodged the BSL-3 bullet, many of my colleagues and PIs have or had their fair share of experience. Feel free to PM me!
That’s likely an even smaller issue. Far-UV inactivates the transient microbiome on the upper skin surface but not in the pores where the majority of the bacteria live. It’s also strictly line of sight and the skin is pretty wrinkly and only small areas (e.g., back of the hands) are exposed and you constantly re-seed your microbiome from other parts of the body. There’s prelim data from hairless mice which found no changes to the microbiome.
Everything touched by the immune system is complicated, agree. But I strongly suspect the net balance will be highly positive, still:
a) As you wrote, seasonal respiratory disease is a massive problem, in the order of trillions of dollars of health and economic damage every year
b) There is some cross-reactivity, yes, but the tail events will be too different from what we usually have. Frequent common-cold exposure will not be the thing that protects us from a GCBR. Neither will the original antigenic sin play a role, as that usually requires quite closely related strains to matter. Overall, your immune system will be a bit less-well prepared for this particular pathogen family that you haven’t encountered in a while, but that’s also the case for any other sufficiently different pathogen.
Re. cost reductions: That’s a bit tricky. With the current lamp tech (KrCl excimer lamps), 20x is not on the table. Their cost floor is closer to 1⁄3 of the current cost. Next-gen (read: solid-state) emitters can achieve 20x in principle but are often still bottlenecked by fundamental academic research; we’re eventually talking about ~5–10 years and 10s to 100s of M of $ to get to fab scale. There are two startups around a different promising approach that might be a bit faster but will require the same money.
For any technologies that have a market, $100M of investment are doable, but far-UV faces a bit of a circular problem: Missing data (safety/effectiveness) → No official recommendations → No market → No emitter R&D and high product prices → Insufficient deployment that limits real-world data. There are now some market-shaping initiatives that will hopefully ameliorate this dynamic so that R&D money flows naturally. But as Max wrote, OP will hopefully also address some of those points after their RFI.
Re. IAQ: The ozone/VOC data are still somewhat contested and in flux, so it remains to be seen what the far-UV impact on real-world IAQ will actually be. But you’re generally right; it’s best to view the IAQ interventions holistically. Ventilation/filtration can complement far-UV, and the best deployment scheme will depend on the environment. But I still don’t worry too much about cost/flexibility limitations, as most environments in which far-UV would be first installed already have decent air handling systems (hospitals, airports, etc.)
Thanks, that would be great!
Oh, I love this. Are there more examples of beautiful poems with some sort of EA-connection?
Howl is often mentioned, of course, but I’d really love some moving lines on the far future or animals or whatnot.
I’d really like to see a detailed write-up or resource collection on market-shaping. Approaches, best practices, etc. At least in biosecurity, more and more interventions are at a stage where the technical feasibility is more or less known (e.g., PPE, far-UVC), and the major bottlenecks can only really be solved by shaping the underlying market.
Great guide; thanks for the write-up! My only gripe is that you posted it a month too late, and I had to plan my visit without it. Still loved it and will come back next year :)
Generally, more groups should do such guides. Visiting big cities with a bunch of EAs is, imho, just great fun!
I’m not sure whether, for example, Arcadia fits that bill of no-strings-attached funding given their research agenda on non-model organisms. But it’s definitely a new science org. Something like Hypothesis Fund (https://www.hypothesisfund.org/) maybe.
I’d recommend having a look at the Overedge Catalogue (https://arbesman.net/overedge/)
I think you meant 12pm to 4:30pm. The calendar event currently starts at midnight.
I’m not sure if I expected more positive comments. Some of the comments certainly disagree heavily (“ivory tower BS”, “future people don’t matter”), but most of the skeptical clusters don’t seem to fundamentally disagree with longtermism. Maybe learned helplessness (or Cheems mindset, sure), or something akin to a filter bubble where you learn about global problems but are not exposed to the (admittedly) fringe approaches to solving them. The climate movement is, for example, very good at spreading doom despite a non-catastrophic outlook. I wonder how much future optimism/progress propaganda à la OWID would help to move the opinion of young, liberal, academic people
Hey Trev, certainly an important topic! However, I downvoted because the post doesn’t meet the standards I’d like to see from a post.
Your core argument and claims are packed into fluff which distracted me and made it harder for me to follow.
You make a lot of (imho) insubstantial claims without backing them up or citing and engaging with any previously published research on that (not very small) field: “wars are sparked when people follow egoistic/convenient motives”, the whole EvoPsych claims, etc.
The conclusions seem vague/not actionable/wrong: “Promote atheism”, “realise that status exists”, “shame soldiers”.
I’d recommend reading more EA forum posts and familiarising yourself with the style of posts that people would like to read before (re)posting tangentially related essays.
Someone extremely on top of the cutting-edge multi-omics game. EA has a lot of bio talent but nobody with years-long metagenomics experience and access to the (often unpublished) knowledge on current best practices, pitfalls, and promising upcoming research.
This must have been a ton of work, thanks for this thorough writeup of current discussions in biosecurity. Thank you for the high praise of SecureBio, too!
I still want to flag three possible misconceptions:
Early in the piece, on the question of motivation for pursuing bioweapons, you ask:
This is an objection we hear relatively frequently and it is somewhat missing the whole reason why the current longtermist-flavored scope-sensitive biosecurity that you discuss in your article emerged—global catastrophic risks. If you truly want to cause catastrophic mass harm (from tens of millions of deaths to extinction), you basically only have nukes and pandemics available. Nukes are practically impossible to obtain, and while pandemic-capable viruses are definitely not trivially easy to make and work with, information and methods around them are close to open-source. Thus, if a malicious actor wants to cause global-scale harm, there aren’t any simpler acts of violence that roughly accomplish the same thing.
On the offense–defense balance of AIxBio progress:
I think this claim understates how much disagreement is around the offense–defense balance of biological tools. The landscape of biological tool capabilities seems to be pretty jagged and it’s not obvious to me that this results in balanced progress, especially given (as you correctly point out) the inherent offense-favor of pandemics. I think it would be a pretty big coincidence if a new technology happens to be exactly as useful for offense as it is for defense. Indeed, the consensus of my colleagues and me at SecureBio is that AI tools will accelerate bioweapon design + deployment well before they enable us to have countermeasure design + deployment that is sufficient to render us acceptably safe from such risks.
On weaponization:
It is a bit unclear to what extent the concept of “weaponization” applies to many of the pandemic threats many people in scope-sensitive biosecurity care about. Historically, weaponization was indeed a pretty big problem for certain BWs, which required specific conditions for storage in munitions, preparation for aerosolization, etc. But as we’ve seen with COVID, “weaponization” for many pandemic-capable pathogens might be essentially complete at the purification stage and only requires getting it onto somebody’s epithelium via a spray bottle. (And regarding the “economics of bioweapons” point, I’d re-emphasize my first point.)
That being said, I definitely agree with most of the things you wrote about biodefense and reasons for optimism. We have a ton of promising interventions that can form a pretty airtight swiss-cheese stack if we manage to implement them; biohardened environments, PPE stockpiles, and widespread early detection alone would make BWs very unattractive. Again, great to see such a detailed piece on biosecurity.