Quote:
Originally Posted by wbradley
But they can't prevent pandemics exploding from their still unknown source. So there should be regulation put on China to keep a watchful eye there in the future involving experts from outside China.
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The reality is in the age of air travel, no one can prevent pandemics, unless there is somehow a coordinated system where all travel can be shut down worldwide. The Obama administration did much less to control the spread of swine flu for example. It takes a few weeks or months to notice an outbreak, while it takes 12 hours for a disease to fly all the way around the world.
A complete moratorium on GoF research might not be a terrible idea considering the possibility of bioterrorism in the future (my impression is currently, it's very difficult for a rogue actor to cook up viruses since you can't just make DNA sequences however you want yet, but one day machines that do that will become easy to obtain). One step below that would be to confine the research to BSL4 labs and have international safety inspections of all BSL-4 labs.
I kind of expect there to be an international treaty on this signed. If scientists can't publish papers on it, almost all the research will stop since most of it is public research (might continue in military settings, but military control would add extra security safeguards). I know you're already pretty sure who is to blame and what happened but there is certainly a diplomatic way to prevent that hypothetical scenario in the future.
Honestly, speaking as someone kind of familiar with the field, AI has the same problem...the research coming out of FAIR and Google Brain strongly suggests to me that it's possible we're only say 10-20 years away from AGI. If they continue with all their open source research, we're probably screwed. If they start to keep the research private, we're still screwed. You can't really ban research that only takes a few people and some computers to do. The idea that you can have "good guys with AI" to fight "bad guys with AI" is kind of ludicrous, as attacking soft targets is much easier than defending them, and we're not even getting into the situation where the AI decides to turn on its creators.
What I find more terrifying than the idea that this could have been a lab leak is that now there is a precedent for who gets blamed and suspected for such a thing...what if someone decides to plant a virus in the US next time around to make the US look bad? It would be extremely easy to go to a crowded place near a high biosafety level lab and spray some virus in the air. It's clear which countries have the stomach to do proper quarantines and which don't. What if this was planted by the CIA in Wuhan, and now China is planning revenge by planting another mild but infectious disease in the US? (in case it's not clear, I don't think that's likely, because it would do more targeted damage to the US if they just produced evidence that it was a CIA operation, but you can imagine that this is now an option that some people out there are considering)