Out-of-distribution Bioattacks

Thanks for writing this, and mentioning my related post, Jeff!

The technological change is the continuing decrease in the knowledge, talent, motivation, and resources necessary to create a globally catastrophic pandemic.

I think this depends on how fast safety measures like the ones you mentioned are adopted, and how the offense-defence balance evolves with technological progress. It would be great if Open Phil released the results of their efforts to quantify biorisk, whose one of the aims was:

• Enumerating possible ‘phase transitions’ that would cause a radical departure from relevant historical base rates, e.g. total collapse of the taboo on biological weapons, such that they become a normal part of military doctrine.

Update on December 3. There plans plans to publish the results:

I worked on a project for Open Phil quantifying the likely number of terrorist groups pursuing bioweapons over the next 30 years, but didn't look specifically at attack magnitudes (I appreciate the push to get a public-facing version of the report published - I'm on it!).

One interesting implication of this theory is that the spread of strict utilitarian philosophies would be a contributing factor to existential risk. The more people are willing to bite utilitarian bullets, the more likely it is that one will bite the "kill everyone" bullet. 

This would make the EA movement potentially existentially dangerous. Even if we don't agree with the human extinction radicals, people might split off from the movement and end up supporting it. One interpretation of the FTX affair was that it was a case of seemingly EA aligned people splitting off to do unethical things justified by utilitarian math.  

Upvoted. I'm really glad that people like you are thinking about this.

Something that people often miss with bioattacks is the economic dimension. After the 2008 financial crisis, economic failure/collapse became perhaps the #1 goalpost of the US-China conflict. 

It's even debatable whether the 2008 financial crisis was the cause of the entire US China conflict (e.g. lots of people in DC and Beijing would put the odds at >60% that >50% of the current US-China conflict was caused by the 2008 recession alone, in contrast to other variables like the emergence of unpredictable changes in cybersecurity).

Unlike conventional war e.g. over Taiwan and cyberattacks, economic downturns have massive and clear effects on the balance of power between the US and China, with very little risk of a pyrrhic victory (I don't currently know how this compares to things like cognitive warfare which also yield high-stakes victories and defeats that are hard to distinguish from natural causes).

Notably, the imperative to cause massive economic damage, rather than destroy the country itself, allows attackers to ratchet down the lethality as far as they want, so long as it's enough to cause lockdowns which cause economic damage (maybe mass IQ reduction or other brain effects could achieve this instead). 

GOF research is filled with people who spent >5 years deeply immersed in a medical perspective e.g. virology, so it seems fairly likely to me that GOF researchers will think about the wider variety of capabilities of bioattacks, rather than inflexibly sticking to the bodycount-maximizing mindset of the Cold War.

I think that due to disorganization and compartmentalization within intelligence agencies, as well as unclear patterns of emergence and decay of competent groups of competent people, it's actually more likely that easier-access biological attacks would first be caused by radicals with privileged access within state agencies or state-adjacent organizations (like Booz Allen Hamilton, or the Internet Research Agency which was accused of interfering with the 2016 election on behalf of the Russian government). 

These radicals might incorrectly (or even correctly) predict that their country is a sinking ship and that they only way out is to personally change the balance of power; theoretically, they could even correctly predict that they are the only ones left competent enough to do this before it's too late.