I agree that success here would reduce risk, but it’s important to note that unless we fund this much more highly than I expect, any scenario in which we flag a pandemic at this stage is still quite bad. The problem is it needs to spread pretty widely before it’s common enough to be detected.
This would also help some via deterrence, though, especially against omnicidal zealots who would only be interested in this sort of approach to the extent that they thought they were likely to wipe out humanity.
If we could just have a chance of losing most of the people in only one major metropolitan area instead of the majority of metropolitan areas across the world, it would ease my mind a lot.
My guess is that it’s hard to predict how the world is going to be oriented towards this sort of thing five or ten years from now. I kinda suspect that a lot might change, depending on how things go with AI. In the general scope of changes that I suspect are possible, this would seem like a small change.
I agree that success here would reduce risk, but it’s important to note that unless we fund this much more highly than I expect, any scenario in which we flag a pandemic at this stage is still quite bad. The problem is it needs to spread pretty widely before it’s common enough to be detected.
This would also help some via deterrence, though, especially against omnicidal zealots who would only be interested in this sort of approach to the extent that they thought they were likely to wipe out humanity.
If we could just have a chance of losing most of the people in only one major metropolitan area instead of the majority of metropolitan areas across the world, it would ease my mind a lot.
For that to be the impact you’d need to be running this in every city, which seems optimistic to me.
My guess is that it’s hard to predict how the world is going to be oriented towards this sort of thing five or ten years from now. I kinda suspect that a lot might change, depending on how things go with AI. In the general scope of changes that I suspect are possible, this would seem like a small change.