At present, if one person chooses to, they can kill a few dozen to a few hundred people. As we discover new technologies, that number is, most likely, only going to go up.
This is an interesting claim, it’s a plausible claim, and it’s something that worries me too. But I’m not actually all that confident it’s true. I think the main change in destructive capacity over the last 50 or 100 years is in bioengineering. But it might be that our defensive capacities are growing even more rapidly than our destructive ones. Is there a way we could measure this? Skilled work hours to create a pathogen versus design a vaccine for it?
This is an interesting claim, it’s a plausible claim, and it’s something that worries me too. But I’m not actually all that confident it’s true. I think the main change in destructive capacity over the last 50 or 100 years is in bioengineering. But it might be that our defensive capacities are growing even more rapidly than our destructive ones. Is there a way we could measure this? Skilled work hours to create a pathogen versus design a vaccine for it?