Bostron was wrong and thus FHI get their position on gain-of-function wrong.
The problem with gain-of-function research wasn’t researchers publishing the sequence of a virus in a paper which can then get used by evil actors to synthezise a harmful virus. The problem was that information on how to do dangerous gain-of-function research was passed on to the Chinese researchers who thought that airborne contagion of coronaviruses wasn’t a problem and thus they did gain-of-function experiments with coronaviruses under biosafety level II which doesn’t protect effectively against airborne infection.
The problem with gain-of-function research wasn’t researchers publishing the sequence of a virus in a paper which can then get used by evil actors to synthezise a harmful virus.
Why do you think that’s not a problem? I think that’s a big problem. There can be more than one problem.
Bruce Schneider’s competition and the lack of any scenario put into reality would be a central argument that this problem isn’t central.
That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter at all, it’s just that it’s not the central problem. Nick Bostrom does write about gain-of-function research in his infohazard writings. It seems to me that he thought he addressed that topic, but he didn’t address it in a way that prevented the most important harm.
Bostron was wrong and thus FHI get their position on gain-of-function wrong.
The problem with gain-of-function research wasn’t researchers publishing the sequence of a virus in a paper which can then get used by evil actors to synthezise a harmful virus. The problem was that information on how to do dangerous gain-of-function research was passed on to the Chinese researchers who thought that airborne contagion of coronaviruses wasn’t a problem and thus they did gain-of-function experiments with coronaviruses under biosafety level II which doesn’t protect effectively against airborne infection.
Why do you think that’s not a problem? I think that’s a big problem. There can be more than one problem.
Bruce Schneider’s competition and the lack of any scenario put into reality would be a central argument that this problem isn’t central.
That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter at all, it’s just that it’s not the central problem. Nick Bostrom does write about gain-of-function research in his infohazard writings. It seems to me that he thought he addressed that topic, but he didn’t address it in a way that prevented the most important harm.