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Comment by ftrobro | Hacker News Reader

"Democratizing genetic engineering won’t suddenly unleash bioterrorism upon the world."

How sure is he of that, and why? As a comparison, nuclear power has been of great utility for many countries, but I sure would not want to see it "democratized".

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Yeah I was with him up to that point.

"None of the kits we sell contain anything dangerous, nor is the average person experimenting with biology inherently dangerous. If you are trying to engineer something hazardous — like say a bat virus — you might have a problem, but the genome search space is large enough that accidentally creating a harmful organism is astronomically improbable. Access to most dangerous materials are also heavily restricted..."

This sounds really sketchy to me. I can't tell if he's lying or if he really can't see any further than his own research program.. sometimes a field of research is just actually existentially dangerous for life on earth, you can't handwave it away.

The possibility of biohacking as a hobby is thrilling. Trouble is, the dangers are so extreme they're difficult to even think about. Like, thought experiment: can you design a virus that kills all eukaryotic cells? Can you think of other possibilities equally terrifying? Of course stuff like that is far off, but neither you nor this guy know whether 'far off' means 10, 100, or 1000 years.

We already have examples of substances that are strictly harmful to almost all life.. Dispersal of them (via the democratization of access to Chemistry) is already placing stress on the biosphere.. which again, is such a large and horrible thing it's hard to imagine or reason about.

Another thing: it is still plausible that covid was a lab escape. I think the biohacker community should be incredibly humbled by that, and really think about how they'll be seen in decades to come.. we've seen cycles of technologists becoming disgraced because of the impact of their products; those cycles seem poised to accelerate. Maybe this is a good time to get on the right side of history?

Do you see any comparison to Machine Learning? I get the impression he considers himself like a hobbyist running some models on their home GPU. Without access to server farms, there is an almost zero percent chance a home hobbyist invents an AI capable of displacing large amounts of human workers or setting off nukes on its own. AI is dangerous, but can be explored safely by a small practitioner. Perhaps these biomaterials are more sensitive though.

Live biomaterials are self-replicating. That's one difference between biotech and any other scary tech we're used to dealing with, like explosives, dangerous chemicals or nuclear material. Even ML scales only as fast as you can buy compute and convince companies and governments to put your algorithms to use. Self-replication is another game entirely.

Ai isn’t really at risk of escaping the lab and afflicting a population with something. I mean, deep fakes went online and that will afflict people, but that’s not the same: the closer parallel is “a technique for bio hacking escaped his computer,” which is different than “I accidentally/sort-of-not-accidentally made mosquitos extinct in my region

I think the current AI threat is less "it's too intelligent and takes over", but rather "it's too stupid but we force it to take over anyway".

Or it’s just the second coming of CIH, and a bunch of computers get bricked.

Democratization of chem isn't responsible for the dispersal, the lack of regulation and proper labeling is. This occurs at the manufacture level not the level of research chemists.

If it turns out that SARS-COV-2 escaped from a lab, that will absolutely be at the level of research (bio)chemists.

The problem with individual biohacking is that there's not even oversight by colleagues. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I'd expect someone working near/with a biochemist who was doing crazy stuff to speak out about it. There's no real equivalent for this if the work is going on in somebody's basement or workshop.

It's hard enought to get any of that stuff to work when you have a fully-stocked lab and a raft of PhDs poking at it from all angles. Some Joe in his garage might get something interesting to happen, but it is a long, long way from there to virulence. The viruses themselves are banging away at this all the time from literally trillions of different angles; how often do they land on a winning ticket?

What's the difference between 0% and 0.0000000000000000000000l%?

0% never happens. .0bar1 can happen on the next pull of the lever.

Never, ever, ever underestimate the danger of small odds and just one...more...pull.

The meaningful comparison is never against zero, but against the next actual number. If Joe is 100x less likely to produce something virulent than this year's genetic lottery, the difference Joe makes is much less than between this year's and last, and thus wholly negligible. Expecially since 100x is far more lucky than Joe is.

I don't why he did not push this to undeveloped country, there are so many poor professor need cheaper cost of experiments

A motivated party can deploy and detonate several bombs in places with a lot of people any day, Covid rules notwithstanding.

It's laughably/terrifyingly easy, the hardest part is building or buying the bombs.

But you don't see it done regularly at all.

Granted, a single nuclear or bio attack would affect way more people.

It is far, far easier (and perfectly safe!) to get there by selling a popular product that poisons millions of people.

All the lead paint and tobacco company executives retired to their yachts, scot free. The fats hydrogenation people responsible for millions of heart failures are walking around loose to this day. Nobody currently responsible for slow, painful deaths via liver damage from sugar poisoning, in the hundreds of thousands each year, is looking over his shoulder.

But people still talk about the Zodiac Killer (who I have no factual reason to believe is Ted Cruz).

The fossil fuel company executives are still walking free, too. As is Ted Cruz (who I have no factual reason to believe is the Zodiac Killer).

I'm not looking forward to the day when I need to choose between privately developed immune system installs for my body. I think this is his vision even though he doesn't go so far to say it or perhaps recognize it. There is some precedent already though, check out Comma AI for instance

but I sure would not want to see it "democratized"

Nuclear power is already "democratized" by design. The basic framework of the non-proliferation treaty is that signatories get to use nuclear power (and receive international assistance developing nuclear power) in exchange for a commitment not to develop nuclear weapons.

Until you can personally sign a non-proliferation agreement and then order processed uranium, nuclear power has not been “democratized” in the sense being talked about here.

Private entities supply nuclear fuel all over the world

https://nuclear.gepower.com/fuel-a-plant

my main point, though, is that nuclear energy is a fairly strange, highly-regulated-at-all-levels beast with its own long complicated history so it's not a particularly straightforward parallel to a hypothetical weapon-of-mass-destruction-enabling genetic engineering

Private entities under strict regulation, yes. Individuals in basements? Not so much. Any such person will be placed in custody in most countries if caught. I remember that happening more than once. I'd provide you a link but would rather not google the subject...

Yeah but requiring school does nothing to prevent abuse. For instance, Kim Jong Un went to university.

Just because people gatekeep knowledge, that doesn't automatically mean only good people will get access to it. It actually means that if bad people infiltrate the gatekeeping organization then they can actually prevent good people from participating

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