Transfecting viruses or bacteria with external DNA is ridiculously simple. There are thousands of kids who do this in middle school research internships and hundreds of thousands who do this in college. Ordering oligo-nucelotides is also very easy to do online. The point of AI biorisk is that you can quickly design a thousand different versions of something many of which will be modifications on known pathogens, many of which might be totally new. You can recombinate those sequences into existing viruses or bacteria or fungi. The biggest piece here is that you don't need to be perfect. You nee only a few to hit - having a 1% or 0.1% success rate is OK. Moreover, they all mutate meaning that even if you didn't do a perfect job they can get more dangerous over time.
I don't think they will fund until there's very clear data that you can translate educational spend into DALYs. Trying to extrapolate studies from the US or other OECD countries to LMICs is probably a really bad idea. Besides spending on education in general we know that education isn'ta fixed commodity that's fungible and infinitely scalable the way pharmaceuticals are i.e. there can be differing quality between teachers and school systems and highly different spillovers based on local economic structure.
I'm happy to see them invest in studying the effects. I think it's important to know that goodwell shouldn't be considered the end all be all for how to give effectively - they operate under one very specific methodology and I'd view them as being a good source for maximizing dollars/DALY in global health vs how to think about all philanthropy.
Governments are making a huge risk by deprioritizing biosecurity when we're rapildy democratizing access to expertise (via AI) needed to created deadly pathogens
Transfecting viruses or bacteria with external DNA is ridiculously simple. There are thousands of kids who do this in middle school research internships and hundreds of thousands who do this in college. Ordering oligo-nucelotides is also very easy to do online. The point of AI biorisk is that you can quickly design a thousand different versions of something many of which will be modifications on known pathogens, many of which might be totally new. You can recombinate those sequences into existing viruses or bacteria or fungi. The biggest piece here is that you don't need to be perfect. You nee only a few to hit - having a 1% or 0.1% success rate is OK. Moreover, they all mutate meaning that even if you didn't do a perfect job they can get more dangerous over time.
I don't think they will fund until there's very clear data that you can translate educational spend into DALYs. Trying to extrapolate studies from the US or other OECD countries to LMICs is probably a really bad idea. Besides spending on education in general we know that education isn'ta fixed commodity that's fungible and infinitely scalable the way pharmaceuticals are i.e. there can be differing quality between teachers and school systems and highly different spillovers based on local economic structure.
I'm happy to see them invest in studying the effects. I think it's important to know that goodwell shouldn't be considered the end all be all for how to give effectively - they operate under one very specific methodology and I'd view them as being a good source for maximizing dollars/DALY in global health vs how to think about all philanthropy.
Governments are making a huge risk by deprioritizing biosecurity when we're rapildy democratizing access to expertise (via AI) needed to created deadly pathogens