“We are less than a decade away from one intelligent crackpot, working in his or her (more likely an incel ‘his’) basement lab, creating or recreating a deadly virus and having it spread covid-19 style across the globe…
The greatest threat to mankind isn’t wealthy people, politicians, and powerful countries, it’s one individual with malice in his heart and access to knowledge, and information, and more power than anyone should ever have.
And I just read this:
“In January 2026, Bill Gates wrote in his annual letter. He didn’t describe the next pandemic as a distant possibility or a risk to be modeled. He said a non-government group using open-source AI tools to design a bioterrorism weapon was not just possible – it was, in his word, coming.” ~ Raven Fon
And just a few days ago:
“AI CEOs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft set aside their rivalry to warn Congress AI is making it too easy to design and create bioweapons” ~ Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
The greatest threat of AI may not be that AI takes over the world, the greatest threat is that it empowers individuals with bad intentions to have significant negative impact and influence over the rest of the world. What we most need to fear is not some sort of revenge of the robots, but rather the loner who hates the world and is empowered by AI to wreak havoc at a scale that is impossible today, but very possible in the near future.
The challenge in dealing with this really serious threat is that as AI intelligence increases, the prevention and defence of the threat will always be chasing the ease with which the threat can be realized. In other words, the threat will will grow faster than the mechanism we design to safeguard against the threats.
Legislation will help, but will it be enough?
