Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's hard to pound nuclear weapons into ploughshares, as they say. I guess I am curious if there is some long-run vision, where… To give another example, in cybersecurity, as time has gone on, I think our systems are more secure today than they were in the past because we found vulnerabilities and we've come up with new encryption schemes and so forth. Is there such a plausible vision in biology or are we just stuck in a world where offense will be privileged so we'll just have to limit access to these tools and have better monitoring but there's not a more robust solution? One of the things I advocated in 2004 is that we stop deluding ourselves into thinking that moratorium and voluntary signups to be good citizens is going to be sufficient. We need to also have surveillance and consequences, and mechanisms for whistleblowers to make it easy for people to report things that they think are out of line. We had essentially moratoria and disapproval for germline editing. Nevertheless, somebody did it and a lot of people knew about it. That was clearly a failure of the whole moratorium and voluntary and whistleblower components.…

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