The main goal of my work these days is trying to reduce the chances of individuals or small groups causing large-scale harm through engineered pandemics, potentially civilizational collapse or extinction. One question in figuring out whether this is worth working on, or funding, is: how large is the risk?

One estimation approach would be to look at historical attacks, but while they've been terrible they haven't actually killed very many people. The deadliest one was the September 11 attacks, at ~3k deaths. This is much smaller scale than the most severe instances of other disasters like dam failure, 25k-250k dead after 1975's Typhoon Nina, or pandemics, 75M-200M dead in the Black Death. If you tighten your reference class even further to include only historical biological attacks by individuals or small groups, the one with the most deaths is just five, in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

[...]

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First published:
December 2nd, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zcxK3p97LwDtXpmRo/out-of-distribution-bioattacks

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Out-of-distribution Bioattacks” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma)