The question I always think of when people raise fears like this about bio-weapons is what what motivations are there for "bad guys" to release indeterminate killers like a bio-engineered virus? It seems like the principles of MAD still apply here. Why launch an initial attack that has the potential to "destroy the world" that either you or you leaders would still hope to inhabit? It would require someone illogical and/or desperate, but yet still had the technological prowess to create the weapon in the first place. It would basically need to be a Bond villain.
Exactly. We're not talking about rational agents anymore, it's about lowering the barrier of entry both financially and technologically so ordinary (arguably insane) people can become Bond villains on a shoestring budget. There are a lot of possible motivations why a person might do this, for example being a religious nutjob, or because date night took a turn for the worse.
They could be rational. A perfect virus that infects every animal on earth and then instantly kills them would decrease the suffering to zero. It's not hard to imagine utility functions where eliminating every human (or animal) is the best choice of action.
Unfortunately, in reality, such attacks are likely to cause huge amounts of suffering which muddies the water.
But if there was a magic button to press that'd instantly eliminate all life on earth, I think it'd only be fair to push it.
Or a well funded terrorist group that believes death will bring with it an eternity of pleasure. Plenty of people strap on suicide vests, and it wouldn't take that many more true believers to develop a suicide virus.
Within our lifetimes, this may well be a "crazy guy in a garage" project.
And the memeset I'd personally put my money on being the proximal cause is "humans are a blight upon Mother Gaia and should be removed at all costs". We don't have to imagine the existence of people who would push the Kill All Humans button if given a chance... we need merely read the right bits of the Internet. Sure, most of them would at least think twice... but there's enough that wouldn't.
I don't know if this is either a cynical or optimistic idea, but I don't know if those groups truly believe that throughout the ranks. That is why you often hear about payments to the family of suicide bombers. They aren't simply doing it for their religious beliefs, but also to help out their family. The same family that would have a 50% chance of death if the particular example virus from the article was released.
Or another way to put it, why is the pope-mobile bulletproof?
Almost all of them committing these atrocities for religious reasons. The Chinese government has treated Tibetan Buddhists horribly for decades, but you don't see any Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers. There have been some sects of Buddhism in the past that have done horrible things, but in general it's harder to become a Buddhist suicide bomber than it is to become a Muslim suicide bomber. Some religions condemn violence of any kind. For example, I doubt anyone could be a Jainist suicide bomber.
If you don't believe me, hear it from the horse's mouth. Here is a video from a Muslim peace conference in Norway:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV710c1dgpU#t=45s It will take five minutes of your time, but I think it shows best how sincere these people are.
> "The question I always think of when people raise fears like this about bio-weapons is what what motivations are there for 'bad guys' to release indeterminate killers like a bio-engineered virus?"
I'd imagine the threat of release would make for a pretty compelling bargaining chip. Potentially, you could gain a lot of leverage without having the backing of a sophisticated military-industrial complex (unlike nukes).
It's kind of like a DIY WMD for the millennial, "maker"-terrorist generation.
Is it really that DIY and cheap compared to other WMD? Is it easier to bio-engineer a virus than it is to steal a truck full of radioactive material [1] and attach it to some big explosives?
I was being somewhat facetious with that last line.
However, I don't think that it is outside the realm of possibility that relatively small entities, on the order of a small-cap corporation or private laboratory, could eventually create a weapon that has far more global destructive power than a radioactive dirty bomb.
This would afford the entity more leverage at a global bargaining table- as opposed to a negotiation with a single government. Combined with the relative anonymity one may be able to maintain when releasing the virus, these entities might see a higher expected value in engineering a virus.
It would be "DIY" in the sense that you wouldn't need the backing of a large nation state to produce an ICBM, or opportunistically steal some radioactive material to create a dirty bomb.
Also, a virus is implicitly cheaper to distribute: with a longer incubation period and an exponentially increasing rate of propagation, a virus could reach critical mass before there's time to react.
In a sense, this makes them more effective than other types of WMD- which may have lower singular chances of successful detonation, have high per unit capital costs, tend to have local area effects only, and are generally difficult to produce far removed from military industry at scale.
Personally, I think the world is more likely to end with a bug than a bang. I honestly don't know which is more terrifying to me.
The line of thought is, that there's always someone willing to contemplate an unpleasant act for shaky reasons, in decreasing numbers, down to a minuscule number of people who would commit the worst atrocity for no reason at all.
The risk comes from widening access to a given technology, and the amount of harm it could do. It's hard to calculate the risks, but bio weapons potentially have wide access and great harm.
There are a lot of power hungry people out there. In fact, our genome is essentially made up of the most successful conquerors and rapists. If you have a bioengineered virus in hand, you have tremendous power (through blackmail), even against powerful governments. You can also hunker down in some far away place (obviously madagascar) while the virus carries out your destruction.
Accidental release should be a major consideration. Also, there are a lot of crazy people out there who do a lot of crazy things for crazy reasons - their logic would either not make sense or be incomplete, but it wouldn't matter to them.
That said, I think biotech is an amazing force for good in the world, we just need to be responsible with how we deal with it. Which means defining and justly implementing 'responsible' is a core tech challenge.
There's a lot of crazy out there. Maybe the "bad guys" have a plan to stay isolated and conquer the ruins or maybe they are just actual bad guys. Look at most public mass shootings for examples of indiscriminate killing. All it might take is one researcher in the right time/right place to decide that they want to release this thing into the wild (for whatever irrational reason).
MAD with nukes works because it's easy to know who is firing at who. Even if a bomb is smuggled into a country and detonated, the original manufacturer can be determined from forensic evidence such as isotope ratios.
With bioweapons, the perpetrator is much harder to track down. And if you don't know who your attacker is, you can't retaliate.
