alt Hacker NewsIt feels like the longtermist believers got involved in this (those are the people obsessed with garage-engineered designer viruses who have a very tenuous grasp on how biology research actually works).
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No "research" is needed to produce pathogens. Catastrophic genomes are already public. All someone has to do is synthesize them, which is, in actual fact, becoming more and more trivial by the day.
The inconvenience of possible mitigation strategies has no bearing on the existence of the risk itself.
I assumed they just wanted to cultivate FOMO to sell an even more expensive version to researchers later on.
Yeah i'm wondering how much of a role that plays in this as well.
On the one hand I could believe it's something more benign, or the usual misunderstood fear mongering making it to some political level (well make sure those users can't get online anonymously! being our current craze).
That said, chemistry and to some level physics have been the major domain of limited knowledge (chemistry because the average person could cause some damage, physics is more of a nation state issue generally).
However I do wonder if there's some legit data on "oh uh...looks like this thing you can make with easy to get and hard to regulate tools is dangerous" in the bio field. I know about the lab rats who want to just screw around in the garage, and it seems like that should be easy to hit at a supply level (much like how certain chemical compounds are just not available for civilians), but maybe there's something legit to limiting the data.
Not that this is a remotely good implementation of that. The hamfisted method does reek of some politician/bureaucrat just saying "No it can't ever return bio questions because RAR!" situation.
I but skimmed the model card on release, but my impression was that there may be an incentive for this expert panel to exaggerate as a form of job security. A lot of the challenges seemed to be of the form “would this allow somebody who isn’t me to do what I do professionally?”
No, by far the most parsimonious explanation is they got slapped by a capricious US government so they went overboard on caution in an attempt not to generate any more controversy. A predictable response of chaotic government regulation.