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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.
China has nukes. Everything Chinese labs do is (to some extent) state sanctioned. What choice do you have? This was always the most idiotic thing about Yudkowskian airstrikes, given the growing technological adeptness of America’s foes. Why would one risk a certain chance of total nuclear war for a partial chance of a killer virus that - at worst - would kill me just the same? It’s poor logic.
The only reason to pick nuking datacenters or virology labs over not doing so would be if your commitment to mankind was so great that you would accept your certain death in exchange for some South Americans and Africans surviving global nuclear war and repopulating the earth in thousands of years.
Alas, I am not that selfless.
He wanted it to be multilateral, where the big powers agree to force the little powers into line. That's the stupidest part of it, the idea of multilateral, genuine, sincere enforcement of a rule as opposed to 'AI for me, not for thee' like 'H-bombs for me, not for thee'.
Why is that stupid?
Because the great powers are incapable of cooperating in this unselfish way. Nuclear arms control is my example - the whole idea started just after the big powers acquired their nuclear arsenal and only applies to weaker latecomers.
Yudkowsky is like those who want global nuclear abolition, where neither big nor little powers have nuclear weapons but for AGI research. No country is going to consciously and deliberately kneecap their capabilities and fall behind in the race, especially in times like these when a competitive edge is in high demand. And AI is even more hard to ban than nuclear weapons. All the strongest lobby groups want more AI and AGI - big tech, big corporations, militaries, state security forces. There's no strong lobby group against AGI like there is against nuclear arms races, the risks are less obvious. AI is profitable and provides economic dividends, unlike piling up huge numbers of nuclear weapons. AI is so much harder to ban than nuclear weapons and we can't even do the latter.
Furthermore, the only two countries with a chance at AGI are the US and China, they're opposing forces. Of course they want to get ahead of the other, that's Made in China 2025 and the US CHIPS act in a nutshell.
Nonproliferation maybe, but big powers have done lots of arms reduction and test ban treaties.
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