• A good op-ed by virologist James Alwine appears in MedPage Today where he argues that while the threat of man-made viral bioweapons created by AI is real and should be mitigated, the threat of a dangerous virus generated via zoonosis is much greater – but we are doing very little to ward against it:
“In nature, viruses have multiple means to randomly mutate, thus enabling them to quickly create millions of variants while infecting and spreading in animals or people. Some of these random changes weaken the variant and it does not survive; other changes make no difference. However, now and then a random change makes a variant that is “better”; for example, it is more efficient at infecting us or at evading our immunity. These more efficient variants are selected and propagate; they become the source of more variants, and the evolution of the virus proceeds…Nature is infinitely better at creating viruses than humans and computers are. At this moment, the generation and spread of viruses in nature, by random change and worldwide mass replication, remains a far greater threat than AI-designed viruses.
The U.S. is presently unaware of what is happening with viruses in nature; we are unprepared for the inevitable next zoonotic epidemic or pandemic. The government’s denial of science and nonchalance toward both known and emerging infectious diseases leaves us in great danger.”