George Church: prediction

Transcript context

…Can I ask you some questions about biodefense? Because some of the stuff you guys work on, or quite responsibly choose not to work on, can keep one up at night. Mirror life. Given the fact that it's physically possible, why doesn't it just happen at some point? Some day it'll get cheap enough. Somebody will care about it enough, that somebody just does it. What's the equilibrium here? I was a co-author on a paper that warned about the dangers of mirror life. Just like I wrote a paper long ago about the dangers of having the synthetic capabilities we have for making synthetic viruses, and to some extent of having new genetic codes. They have a few things in common. The advance that we were recognizing, in our Science paper that was warning about mirror life, is not only that we had to calculate the possibility of error-prone escape or something like that was. We don't want anything to escape that we made in the lab unless there's a general societal consensus that it's a good thing. So far there aren't any examples of that. Mirror life, if it can be weaponized, that would take it to a whole other level of concern. The concern was that if we got it to a certain point, then it would be easy to weaponize it. Again, there's practical considerations that maybe that most people who consider weaponizing mirror life would probably be satisfied with weaponizing viruses that already exist, that are already pathogens. And they wouldn't want to destroy themselves and their family and their legacy and everything like that. But all it takes is one, one group probably, or one person. But your question is, is it inevitable? I don't know. It might be. It's quite possible it's already here. In other words, we already have mirror life in our solar system or maybe even on our planet. It just hasn't been weaponized. What we were saying in the Science paper is that this seems like the sort of thing that could wipe out all competing life if were properly weaponized. But there are probably a few things like that. What we really need to do is reduce the motivation to do that, maybe increase our preparedness for a variety of existential threats. Some of which will be natural, some of which will be one disgruntled person who has essentially too much power. Over the history of humanity, the amount of things that a single person can do has grown very significantly. It used to be, when you had your bare hands, there was kind of a limit to what one person could do. A large number of people could team up and get a mammoth or something like that. Today, one person with the right connections or right access to technology could blow up a city. That's a huge increase in capability. I think we want to start dialing that back a little bit somehow. What does that look like in terms of not just mirror life, but synthetic biology in general? Maybe we're at an elevated period of the ratio to offense and defense. How do we get to an end state where—even if there's lots of people running around with bad motivations—somehow there are defenses built up that we would still survive, where we're robust against that kind of thing? Is such an equilibrium possible? Or will offense always be privileged in this game?…

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