No existential risk from engineered pathogens – too many barriers and no data supports it

We’ve seen throughout Parts 9, 10 and 11 of this series that it is extremely difficult to engineer a pathogen which could lead to existential catastrophe. Ord seems to be claiming not only that such a pathogen could be developed in this century, but also that states may soon develop such a pathogen as a form of mutually assured destruction. Both claims need substantial argument, the latter not least because humanity already has access to a much more targeted deterrent in the form of nuclear weapons. That isn’t to say that Ord’s claim here is false, but it is to say that a single sentence won’t do. If there is a serious case to be made that states can, and soon may develop pathogens which could lead to existential catastrophe in order to deter others, that case needs to be made with the seriousness and care that it deserves.

Ord notes that historical data does not reflect substantial casualties from bioweapons. However, Ord suggests, we may have too little data to generalize from, and in any case the data suggests a “power law” distribution of fatalities that may favor high estimates of existential risk. That’s fair enough, though we saw in Part 12 that power law estimates of existential biorisk face substantial difficulties, and also that the most friendly published power law estimate puts the risks orders of magnitude lower than Ord does.

From here, Ord transitions into a discussion of the dangers posed by the democratization of biotechnology and the spread of `do-it-yourself’ science. Ord writes:

Such democratization promises to fuel a boom of entrepreneurial biotechnology. But since biotechnology can be misused to lethal effect, democratization also means proliferation. As the pool of people with access to a technique grows, so does the chance it contains someone with malign intent.

We discussed the risk of `do-it-yourself’ science in Part 10 of this series. There, we saw that a paper by David Sarapong and colleagues laments “Sensational and alarmist headlines about DiY science” which “argue that the practice could serve as a context for inducing rogue science which could potentially lead to a ‘zombie apocalypse’.” These experts find little empirical support for any such claims.

That skepticism is echoed by most leading experts and policymakers. For example, we also saw in Part 10 that a study of risks from synthetic biology by Catherine Jefferson and colleagues decries the “myths” that “synthetic biology could be used to design radically new pathogens” and “terrorists want to pursue biological weapons for high consequence, mass casualty attacks”, concluding:

Any bioterrorism attack will most likely be one using a pathogen strain with less than optimal characteristics disseminated through crude delivery methods under imperfect conditions, and the potential casualties of such an attack are likely to be much lower than the mass casualty scenarios frequently portrayed. This is not to say that speculative thinking should be discounted … however, problems arise when these speculative scenarios for the future are distorted and portrayed as scientific reality.