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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.
I told you guys letting the scientists get away with millions of deaths with not even so much as the hint of a punishment would come to bite us in the ass.
I mean come on, at least give 10 years hard labor to single Dyatlov pour encourager les autres. It's not like there's any shortage of guilt to go around, the whole program the US supposedly ended was likely completely illegal and we even have people like Fauci actively conspiring to hide the mere consideration of COVID escaping from a lab.
When you refuse to render justice and punish the guilty, you are justly rewarded with larger and larger messes.
Unlike Bostrom I don't believe in an infinitely large mess that consumes all mankind, I think nature is very rarely that self reinforcing and that extinction is more likely to come from slow decay or the completely unpredictable. If fucking with nature could totally wipe us out we'd probably already be dead a thousand times over already given how fast and loose we've been playing with the forces of nature these past few centuries.
That said, since I'm not really eager for a new black plague, can't we just, this one time, agree not to pursue something that's totally worthless as a weapon, actively harmful to humanity and doesn't even answer any questions about the universe we really want the answer to?
I think Moldbug nailed it with his analysis. Researchers want to work on the most important problems in their fields. In viral research it's deadly airborne diseases. There's a shortage of deadly pandemic viruses to study, so they create them. That way they have something to write papers on.
Do you recall which essay of Moldbug this was in?
Covid is science's Chernobyl from the other reply but I think he stated it in a more straightforward way in a 2020 interview with Michael Malice or Unregistered Podcast. Unfortunately those are very long and I can't find the right one.
Probably one of these if you have enough time: https://youtube.com/results?search_query=yarvin+after%3A2020-01-01+before%3A2021-12-01
Here's a similar comment, I'm not sure if it's the exact bit I remember https://youtube.com/watch?v=BUhYbbBfG2c&t=2804
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