Balancing the Risks: AI vs. Virus Research.
The US is still conducting research into making deadlier and more contagious diseases, even while there’s legitimate concern that work like that may have even caused Covid. While AI and the possibility that sufficiently powerful systems will kill us all suddenly emerged onto center stage, research that seeks to make pathogens more powerful might also end civilization as we know it. The movement to slow down AI and dangerous gain-of-function research on pathogens of pandemic potential often depends on random chance, and risks to the security of our whole world received sober scrutiny regardless of whether they happened to make the headlines.