80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity’s single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong.Andrew’s job at Open Philanthropy is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect as much of humanity as possible in the worst-case scenarios — those with fatality rates near 100% and the collapse of technological civilisation a live possibility.Video, full transcript, and links to learn more: https://80k.info/asbAs Andrew lays out, there are several ways this could happen, including:A national bioweapons programme gone wrong, in particular Russia or North KoreaAI advances making it easier for terrorists or a rogue AI to release highly engineered pathogensMirror bacteria that can evade the immune systems of not only humans, but many animals and potentially plants as wellMost efforts to combat these extreme bioris