Can we really take these jokers seriously?

Of course given the potential deadly consequences we can't call them jokers.

According to Dario Amodei

> When something works really well, it goes much faster: there’s an accelerated approval track and the ease of approval is much greater when effect sizes are larger. mRNA vaccines for COVID were approved in 9 months—much faster than the usual pace. That said, even under these conditions clinical trials are still too slow—mRNA vaccines arguably should have been approved in ~2 months. But these kinds of delays (~1 year end-to-end for a drug) combined with massive parallelization and the need for some but not too much iteration (“a few tries”) are very compatible with radical transformation in 5-10 years. Even more optimistically, it is possible that AI-enabled biological science will reduce the need for iteration in clinical trials by developing better animal and cell experimental models (or even simulations) that are more accurate in predicting what will happen in humans. This will be particularly important in developing drugs against the aging process, which plays out over decades and where we need a faster iteration loop.

The authors of this paper don't think so.

http://www.paom.pl/Changing-Views-toward-mRNA-based-Covid-Va...

@DarioAmodei You don't suppose the same technology could be used to develop biological warfare agents?