How much you fear a weapon should also depend on how likely somebody is to use it against you.
Almost nobody is likely to use biological weapons, because they’re no good for the reasons you tend to use weapons in the first place. Especially not people who have access to the kinds of long-distance delivery systems you mention… and these are not weapons you want to use without long-distance delivery.
For any approximately rational actor, in either the Less Wrong “utility maximizing” sense or in the common “not shockingly stupid or ravingly insane” sense, the point of using a weapon isn’t to kill the maximum number of people. It’s to get your enemies to do what you want, even if that’s just to stop keeping you from doing what you want. Typically:
To raise the cost of not giving in, relative to the cost of giving in. Comes in two flavors:
“Do what I want, or I shall continue to use my weapon against you”. Bioweapons are bad for that, because you can’t necessarily stop after you’ve started.
“Don’t do what I don’t want, or I shall unleash my weapon on you”. This is really the only thing where something like a bioweapon might be effective… but even then it’s usually a bad deterrent, because your enemy has to believe that you’re willing to do it, even though you can’t target the weapon well, it will alienate your potential allies, and it might very well backfire on you. And if somebody does choose to use them this way, that means they must hope to succeed. “Success” here means you don’t actually activate the weapon.
To win in the “court of public opinion” and get others to put pressure on your target or join your cause. Weapons in general are pretty bad for this, but sometimes you can get attention using them… if you do it in a sympathetic-looking way, which is where things usually fall apart. Bioweapons really fall apart, because those bystanders are going to worry about the weapon running amok on them.
Extremely rarely, to actually destroy your enemy completely, and thus get them out of the way. This almost never works, and the people who actually make military decisions understand that. And even if you’re going to try it, bioweapons are a desperation choice, because if you release them at a large enough scale to do this, they’re likely to do massive damage to you.
A good weapon destroys what you want to destroy, when you want to destroy it, no more and no less. Absolute lethality is not a major consideration. Anybody who can actually execute on getting and using the weapons is very likely to figure that out. If they’re actual military people, they will have been trained on it.
Lethality per unit mass really doesn’t matter; mass is cheap. I don’t know why you’d even think about using that metric.
For most people, most of the time, bioweapons are bad weapons. They cause a too-random amount of damage, to too-random people in too-random places, over a too-random period of time with a too-random delay. They only really appeal to omnicidal maniacs: people who just truly want to cause maximum death, as a terminal goal. Such people are rare, poorly resourced, isolated, and usually incompetent to boot. That has to matter for how much you worry about them. Other people might use the weapons, but it makes sense to weight you concern according to how likely that is.
Look at nuclear weapons. So far, at least, after the first use, they’ve only been used as a deterrent, because massive indiscriminate destruction isn’t usually a goal in itself, and everybody’s afraid of the blowback. But nuclear weapons are still way more targetable than bioweapons.
I mean, yeah, there are nuts out there, and some of them could do something. But on the whole you’re more likely to get killed by a weapon better suited to somebody’s actual goals. I really think that most of the reason you want biological “defenses” is natural pandemics, not weaponization.
The comparison to standard government arsensals is a little confusing, but I was assuming biological weapons are scary because AI and improvements in virus synthesis technology are putting them in reach of non-government[1] entities.
Misaligned AI might want to make biological weapons for its own reasons, and even if it doesn’t, anything that makes onmicidal maniacs need less competence is scary.
How much you fear a weapon should also depend on how likely somebody is to use it against you.
Almost nobody is likely to use biological weapons, because they’re no good for the reasons you tend to use weapons in the first place. Especially not people who have access to the kinds of long-distance delivery systems you mention… and these are not weapons you want to use without long-distance delivery.
For any approximately rational actor, in either the Less Wrong “utility maximizing” sense or in the common “not shockingly stupid or ravingly insane” sense, the point of using a weapon isn’t to kill the maximum number of people. It’s to get your enemies to do what you want, even if that’s just to stop keeping you from doing what you want. Typically:
To raise the cost of not giving in, relative to the cost of giving in. Comes in two flavors:
“Do what I want, or I shall continue to use my weapon against you”. Bioweapons are bad for that, because you can’t necessarily stop after you’ve started.
“Don’t do what I don’t want, or I shall unleash my weapon on you”. This is really the only thing where something like a bioweapon might be effective… but even then it’s usually a bad deterrent, because your enemy has to believe that you’re willing to do it, even though you can’t target the weapon well, it will alienate your potential allies, and it might very well backfire on you. And if somebody does choose to use them this way, that means they must hope to succeed. “Success” here means you don’t actually activate the weapon.
To win in the “court of public opinion” and get others to put pressure on your target or join your cause. Weapons in general are pretty bad for this, but sometimes you can get attention using them… if you do it in a sympathetic-looking way, which is where things usually fall apart. Bioweapons really fall apart, because those bystanders are going to worry about the weapon running amok on them.
Extremely rarely, to actually destroy your enemy completely, and thus get them out of the way. This almost never works, and the people who actually make military decisions understand that. And even if you’re going to try it, bioweapons are a desperation choice, because if you release them at a large enough scale to do this, they’re likely to do massive damage to you.
A good weapon destroys what you want to destroy, when you want to destroy it, no more and no less. Absolute lethality is not a major consideration. Anybody who can actually execute on getting and using the weapons is very likely to figure that out. If they’re actual military people, they will have been trained on it.
Lethality per unit mass really doesn’t matter; mass is cheap. I don’t know why you’d even think about using that metric.
For most people, most of the time, bioweapons are bad weapons. They cause a too-random amount of damage, to too-random people in too-random places, over a too-random period of time with a too-random delay. They only really appeal to omnicidal maniacs: people who just truly want to cause maximum death, as a terminal goal. Such people are rare, poorly resourced, isolated, and usually incompetent to boot. That has to matter for how much you worry about them. Other people might use the weapons, but it makes sense to weight you concern according to how likely that is.
Look at nuclear weapons. So far, at least, after the first use, they’ve only been used as a deterrent, because massive indiscriminate destruction isn’t usually a goal in itself, and everybody’s afraid of the blowback. But nuclear weapons are still way more targetable than bioweapons.
I mean, yeah, there are nuts out there, and some of them could do something. But on the whole you’re more likely to get killed by a weapon better suited to somebody’s actual goals. I really think that most of the reason you want biological “defenses” is natural pandemics, not weaponization.
The comparison to standard government arsensals is a little confusing, but I was assuming biological weapons are scary because AI and improvements in virus synthesis technology are putting them in reach of non-government[1] entities.
Misaligned AI might want to make biological weapons for its own reasons, and even if it doesn’t, anything that makes onmicidal maniacs need less competence is scary.
Not that it would be safe or a good idea for governments to create world-ending plagues, but they already have world-ending bombs.