Out-of-distribution Bioattacks

I think efforts to reduce insider risk are also really valuable, but these look less like the kind of technical work I've been focusing on and more like better policies at labs and not engaging in particular kinds of risky research.

Out of your proposal, it seems to me that the LLM question is a policy question. Faster evaluation of vaccines also is a lot about policy. 

In general, that sentiment sounds a bit like "It's easy to search the keys under the lampost, so that's what I will do".

Esvelt doesn't have in his threat model "people who work on vaccines release the pathogen for their own gain" the way Bruce Edwards Ivins did according to the FBI.

Esvelt does say dangerous things like "Only after intense discussions at the famous Asilomar conference of 1975 did they correctly conclude that recombinant DNA within carefully chosen laboratory-adapted constructs posed no risk of spreading on its own."

While you might argue that the amount of risk is acceptable, pretending that it's zero makes Kevin Esvelt not have that much credibility when it comes to the actual act of reducing risk. He lists a bunch of interventions that EA funders can spend their money so that they can feel like they are taking action effective action about biorisk while not addressing the center of the risk. 

Pulling this to the top, because it seems, um, cruxish...

I think the best I can do here is to say that Kevin Esvelt (MIT professor, biologist, CRISPR gene drive inventor, etc) doesn't see this as a blocker.

In this sort of case, I think appeal to authority is appropriate, and that's a lot better authority than I have.

Just to be clear and pull all of the Esvelt stuff together, are you saying he thinks that...

1. Given his own knowledge and/or what's available or may soon be available to the public,
2. plus a "reasonable" lab that might be accessible to a small "outsider" group or maybe a slightly wealthy individual,
3. and maybe a handful of friends,
4. plus at least some access to the existing biology-as-a-service infrastructure,
5. he could design and build a pathogen, as opposed to evolving one using large scale in vivo work,
6. and without having to passage it through a bunch of live hosts,
7. that he'd believe would have a "high" probability of either working on the first try, or
   1. failing stealthily enough that he could try again,
   2. including not killing him when he released it,
   3. and working within a few tries,
8. to kill enough humans to be either an extinction risk or a civilization-collapsing risk,
9. and that a relatively sophisticated person with "lesser" qualifications, perhaps a BS in microbiology, could
   1. learn to do the same from the literature, or
   2. be coached to do it by an LLM in the near future.

Is that close to correct? Are any of those wrong, incomplete, or missing the point?

When he gets into a room with people with similar qualifications, how do they react to those ideas? Have you talked it over with epidemiologists?

The scale of the attacks I'm trying to talk about are ones aimed at human extinction or otherwise severely limiting human potential (ex: preventing off-world spread). Either directly, through infecting and killing nearly everyone, or indirectly through causing global civilizational collapse. You're right that I'm slightly sloppy in calling this "extinction", but the alternatives are verbosity or jargon.

I think that, even if stragglers die on their own, killing literally everyone is qualitatively harder than killing an "almost everyone" number like 95 percent. And killing "almost everyone" is qualitatively harder than killing (or disabling) enough people to cause a collapse of civilization.

I also doubt that a simple collapse of civilization^[1] would be the kind of permanent limiting event you describe^[2].

I think there's a significant class of likely-competent actors who might be risk-tolerant enough to skate the edge of "collapsing civilization" scale, but wouldn't want to cause extinction or even get close to that, and certainly would never put in extra effort to get extinction. Many such actors probably have vastly more resources than anybody who wants extinction. So they're a big danger for sub-extinction events, and probably not a big danger for extinction events. I tend to worry more about those actors than about omnicidal maniacs.

So I think it's really important to keep the various levels distinct.

Instead of one 100% fatal pathogen you could combine several, each with a ~independent lower rate.

How do you make them independent? If one disease provokes widespread paranoia and/or an organized quarantine, that affects all of them. Same if the population gets so sparse that it's hard for any of them to spread.

Also, how does that affect the threat model? Coming up with a bunch of independent pathogens presumably takes a better-resourced, better-organized threat than coming up with just one. Usually when you see some weird death cult or whatever, they seem to do a one-shot thing, or at most one thing they've really concentrated on and one or two low effort add-ons. Anybody with limited resources is going to dislike the idea of having the work multiplied.

The idea is that to be a danger to civilization would likely either need to be so infectious that we are not able to contain it (consider a worse measles) or have a long enough incubation period that by the time we learn about it it's already too late (consider a worse HIV).

The two don't seem incompatible, really. You could imagine something that played along asymptomatically (while spreading like crazy), then pulled out the aces when the time was right (syphilis).

Which is not to say that you could actually create it. I don't know about that (and tend to doubt it). I also don't know how long you could avoid surveillance even if you were asymptomatic, or how much risk you'd run of allowing rapid countermeasure development, or how closely you'd have to synchronize the "aces" part.

This depends a lot on how much you think a tiny number of isolated stragglers would be able to survive and restart civilization.

True indeed. I think there's obviously some level of isolation where they all just die off, but there's probably some lower level of isolation where they find each other enough to form some kind of sustainable group... after the pathogen has died out. Humans are pretty long-lived.

You might even have a sustainable straggler group survive all together. Andaman islanders or the like.

By the way, I don't think "sustainable group" is the same as "restart civilization". As long as they can maintain a population in hunter-gatherer or primitive pastoralist mode, restarting civilization can wait for thousands of years if it has to.

In the stealth scenario, we don't know that we need therapy/vaccination until it's too late.

Doesn't that mean that every case has to "come out of incubation" at relatively close to the same time, so that the first deaths don't tip people off? That seems really hard to engineer.

Bioweapons in general are actually kind of lousy for non-movie-villains at most scales, including large scales, because they're so unpredictable, so poorly controllable, and so poorly targetable.

I don't think those apply for the kind of omnicidal actors I'm covering here?

Well, yes, but what I was trying to get at was that omnicidal actors don't seem to me like the most plausible people to be doing very naughty things.

It kind of depends on what kind of resources you need to pull off something really dramatic. If you need to be a significant institution working toward an official purpose, then the supply of omnicidal actors may be nil. If you need to have at least a small group and be generally organized and functional and on-task, I'd guess it'd be pretty small, but not zero. If any random nut can do it on a whim, then we have a problem.

I was writing on the assumption that reality is closer to the beginning of that list.

Happy to get into these too if you like!

I might like, all right, but at the moment I'm not sure I can or should commit the time. I'll see how things look tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of your comment is asking for things that are likely to be info hazardous, and

Well, actually it's more like pointing out that those things don't exist. I think (1) through (4) are in fact false/impossible.

But if I'm wrong, it could still be possible to support them without giving instructions.

I'd like to see an explanation for why to shift the burden of proof to the people that are warning us.

Well, I think one applicable "rationalist" concept tag would be "Pascal's Mugging".

But there are other issues.

If you go in talking about mad environmentalists or whoever trying to kill all humans, it's going to be a hard sell. If you try to get people to buy into it, you may instead bring all security concerns about synthetic biology into disrepute.

To whatever degree you get past that and gain influence, if you're fixated on "absolutely everybody dies in the plague" scenarios (which again are probably impossible), then you start to think in terms of threat actors who, well, want absolutely everybody to die. Whatever hypotheticals you come up with there, they're going to involve very small groups, possibly even individuals, and they're going to be "outsiders". And deranged in a focused, methodical, and actually very unusal way.

Thinking about outsiders leads you to at least deemphasize the probably greater risks from "insiders". A large institution is far more likely to kill millions, either accidentally or on purpose, than a small subversive cell. But it almost certainly won't try to kill everybody.

... and because you're thinking about outsiders, you can start to overemphasize limiting factors that tend to affect outsiders, but not insiders. For example, information and expertise may be bottlenecks for some random cult, but they're not remotely as serious bottlenecks for major governments. That can easily lead you to misdirect your countermeasures. For example all of the LLM suggestions in the original post.

Similarly, thinking only about deranged fanatics can lead you to go looking for deranged fanatics... whereas relatively normal people behaving in what seem to them like relatively normal ways are perhaps a greater threat. You may even miss opportunities to deal with people who are deranged, but not focused, or who are just plain dumb.

In the end, by spending time on an extremely improbable scenario where eight billion people die, you can seriously misdirect your resources and end up failing to prevent, or mitigate, less improbabl cases where 400 million die. Or even a bunch of cases where a few hundred die.