Hmm, can you think of a plausible biological mechanism by which a virus could evolve to not cause fever, or to cause fever later than usual? My initial reaction is to be skeptical that fever screening would result in the effects you suggest, mainly because whether or not you get a fever is mostly a function of your innate immune system kicking in and not a function of the virus. Whether or not you get a fever is mostly out of the virus’s control, so to speak. The virus could perhaps evolve methods of evading innate immunity, but other examples I’ve seen of viral adaptation to innate immunity seem like they involve complex mechanisms, which I would guess would not evolve on timescales as short as we’re concerned with here (although here I’d welcome correction from someone with more experience in these matters).
But even if there were potential evolutionary solutions close at hand for a virus to evolve evasion to host innate immune responses, I’m not sure that fever screening would really accelerate the discovery of those solutions, given that the virus is already under such extreme selection pressure to evade host immunity. After all, the virus has to face host immune systems in literally every host, whereas fever screening only applies to a tiny fraction of them.
(Comment duplicated from the EA Forum.)
I think the central “drawing balls from an urn” metaphor implies a more deterministic situation than that which we are actually in – that is, it implies that if technological progress continues, if we keep drawing balls from the urn, then at some point we will draw a black ball, and so civilizational devastation is basically inevitable. (Note that Nick Bostrom isn’t actually saying this, but it’s an easy conclusion to draw from the simplified metaphor). I’m worried that taking this metaphor at face value will turn people towards broadly restricting scientific development more than is necessarily warranted.
I offer a modification of the metaphor that relates to differential technological development. (In the middle of the paper, Bostrom already proposes a few modifications of the metaphor based on differential technological development, but not the following one). Whenever we draw a ball out of the urn, it affects the color of the other balls remaining in the urn. Importantly, some of the white balls we draw out of the urn (e.g., defensive technologies) lighten the color of any grey/black balls left in the run. A concrete example of this would be the summation of the advances in medicine over the past century, which have lowered the risk of a human-caused global pandemic. Therefore, continuing to draw balls out of the urn doesn’t inevitably lead to civilizational disaster – as long as we can be sufficiently discriminate towards those white balls which have a risk-lowering effect.