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I believe it depends. Free speech is not without limits. I think there's still a lot of discussion in the biomed community about the legality/ethics of releasing methods that can be used by bad actors to generate potentially harmful results.

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All sorts of software can be used to “generate potentially harmful results”. Think about an algorithm for displaying content on social media sites, a search engine, a piece of malware on a computer. Do we ban books on how to make bombs? It’s such a broad point to make that it’s practically meaningless. The computers job is to read a set of instructions and execute them. It’s abstractly no different to a human writing instructions for another human, with the adage that the computer is a much faster processor than a human. You can quite literally run these ML models (a collection of statistically weighted averages) with pen and paper and a calculator (or even none!). Things will be maliciously used, that means we don’t ban sharp forks (at the determent of legitimate users), we ban those that intentionally misuse those tools.

You’re correct, and, yes, it can apply to virtually anything. But we don’t let that hold us hostage for properly mitigating risk.

I think the distinction is when a threat is “imminent”. To the point of this thread, I don’t think the dialogue has progressed enough to form a consensus on where that “imminent threshold” lies.

Teaching someone about DNA doesn’t constitute an imminent threat. But the equivalent of teaching the recipe for a biological weapon may be considered enough of an imminent risk to warrant regulation.

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