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I don't see how that's the case.
If you were already reasonably wealthy (~few million USD at hand) or magically given the money, then you absolutely would be bottlenecked by knowledge.
You could purchase lab equipment, reagents etc, hire staff without much difficulty. I think you would rapidly find out that your staff have thoughts when they get an inkling of what you're up to. I can think of a semi-legitimate way to avoid scrutiny, but thanks to @faul_sname 's reminder, I'm not going to blab. It's very obvious to me even as someone not directly involved in microbiology, so any competent actor would recognize it as their best bet. Even [REDACTED] would only get you so far.
Alternatively, you could go do a bachelor's and masters in microbiology and try and manage as much as you could yourself, but that still leaves plenty of scope for being unmasked.
Right now:
Right now, I think you need a state-level actor to safely make bioweapons at scale. Smaller, if you accept the massive risk of failing and dying because of error. Much of that is a combination of knowing the right things/hiring the right people, and then motivating them properly.
As it stands, I think a blanket-ban on anything with a whiff of bioweapons research seems warranted. What are the upsides really? If you have a legitimate use case, you want the government on your side, and probably enough organizational weight to negotiate for looser restraints from the labs.
This and the fear that the layman can use a LLM to make bioweapons are in completely different realms of argumentation. Only a tiny fraction of the population makes enough money to have a ~few million usd on hand.
As you pointed out, you can go get the knowledge, the skillset, the knowledge of the process, nothing is stopping you, except you know time to do all of that. The fear is that an LLM can skip a 4 year degree + a 2 year masters in providing you all of that. Idk much about biology, but I am passingly familiar with explosives.
The cost of bioweapons development has dropped dramatically. While I can't quote a sticker figure for a whole bioweapons project (for understandable reasons), I can point out that all the necessary components, like access to genetic sequencing and engineering, lab equipment etc have all drastically dropped in price over time.
I'm not claiming that an oracular AGI will let the average American with the average bank account make a pandemic in his garage. This is partly predicated on similarly (or likely more) powerful AI being deployed in screening and defense.
My point is that we risk moving from a regime where it takes:
To:
It is clear to me that this relaxation will balloon the number of people/orgs who meet the criteria of knowledge/motivation/wealth.
Explosives do not, as a rule, self-replicate or mutate. Completely different ballpark. Any redneck can make a pipe bomb, and many without blowing off a finger. Nuclear bombs, which are on the same scale of lethality, require far more effort.
Money? I am positing both independent wealth and the ability to get a degree. Just the degree isn't sufficient unless you have millions of dollars, as a rough bound. Most terrorists are somewhat broken individuals, they are unlikely to go to all that bother or stick it out.
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