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Apparently, a lab in china has created a virus with a 100% kill rate in humanized mice. Combined with the fact that there's a decent chance that COVID was a lab leak, this sort of thing is extremely dangerous to be doing.
I'm not sure how best to make it so that people are not incentivized to do things like this, but ceasing to fund this variety of research (it looks like the US ended one program that was pushing this sort of thing last year), and instating some sort of legal liability on those who do this, and especially if they dispose of it badly, probably seem like good decisions.
Extremely dangerous diseases are among the top few things in being both disastrous to humanity (unlike climate change) and also relatively likely (unlike a massive asteroid hitting earth). Development of them is also something that is not excessively difficult to do. This is probably the closest thing we have so far to Bostrom's black ball metaphor. People joke about Yudkowskian airstrikes on data centers; would airstrikes on labs be similarly warranted? More seriously, though, there should be far more effort put into preventing this sort of thing than there currently is.
Bostrom's concerns should probably be something more important to be aware of. The ideal is just to not develop technology in specific fields to the point that killing millions is a cheap and easy thing to do. Of course, the tradeoff is totalitarianism, a terror of its own.
EDIT: Some of the comments have argued, relatively convincingly, that this particular news story was overblown and misleading.
Although the odds are low, this is a bigger threat than AI but not as newsworthy. Things which are the least possible, like UFOs, get the most media coverage.
Depends what sort of threat you're talking about.
Bigger GCR? Yes, definitely.
Bigger X-risk? No. Pandemics can't kill off humanity because they'll die off before population density reaches 0. Biorisk is definitely #2 on my list of X-risks this century, and in the same order of magnitude as #1 i.e. AI, but that's Life 2.0 risks - synthetic biology that's not a human pathogen but whose replication destroys something humans need (e.g. a synthetic alga that doesn't need phosphate, has better carbon-fixing than RuBisCO, and can't be digested by the aquatic foodchain, which would pull down the atmospheric and then biospheric carbon into useless gunk on the seafloor and thus cause total crop failure).
Even if pandemics can't kill off humanity alone, but they can radically inhibit our ability to handle existential risks, e.g. an asteroid; if there are a few thousand people left, they're not going to be able to develop a sufficient space program to handle such a problem. Often when a species goes extinct, there seem to be a number of factors that accelerate each other, e.g. hunger in a changed environment, then disease, then increased predation, then problems of fertile males and fertile females hooking up, then inbreeding...
However, a virus with a sufficiently long asymptomatic period when it can spread could kill off humanity, if it could spread to 100% of the population in time. Think of something like airborne HIV. Is that likely? No. Is it scientifically possible? Yes.
I agree that synthetic biology is the more plausible threat.
Incidentally this is the strategy for winning the game Pandemic. Spread to 100% infection, then reveal the deadly symptoms.
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Asteroids large enough to kill the species are ludicrously rare, even after accounting for a reduced humanity being easier to kill (another Chicxulub would not suffice to end modern humanity, not on its own - note that I am not talking about our ability to deflect it, here, but our ability to survive the impact winter - but a humanity that had been almost totally destroyed by super-Black-Death might succumb, so call it 1/100,000,000 years instead of 1/500,000,000 - still negligible over the relatively-short timespan it'd take to repopulate and rebuild).
Even airborne HIV would still have great difficulty getting to hermits and uncontacted tribes. The one thing which would clearly work if possible - but which may not even be possible and certainly wouldn't be easy to build - is an infection which made victims consciously want to spread it, essentially a human version of all those parasites that zombify insects (not just a toxoplasma or a rabies, which are far-blunter instruments). That would have the intelligent-adversary trait where losing isn't survivable because survivors will be actively hunted down (and also it would be in every country within days because people would deliberately sneeze all over airports). Frankly, I think that even if possible this would probably need a superintelligence to design it, which means it's most sensibly placed under "AI risk" rather than "biorisk".
Hermits are not a promising way to avoid human extinction.
These are definitely vulnerable extinction events, including those more likely than large asteroids.
I'm not saying that a pandemic is a huge x-risk event, but rather that it's easy to underrate its connection with x-risk if one just looks at first-order impacts.
Agreed. "What would happen if the Thing had reached civilization?" has been one of my favourite daydream questions recently, but the Thing makes most sense as a specially engineered bioweapon developed by a very advanced intelligence.
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