alt Hacker NewsI don't know why you emphasize rogue and non-state actors. It seems equally likely to me that it would be done by America. America is the only country who deployed nukes (Japan) and chemical weapons (Vietnam) on massive scales.
I can agree that access to bioengineering tooling is easier and cheaper than ever, and thus eventually it stands to reason that a nobody in his basement could engineer a lethal novel virus and lose control of it.
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I emphasize rogue and non-state actors because they're more likely to be accelerated/enabled by LLMs. Large states like the USA already have access to modern bioweapon technology (and have a longer track record of not deploying them).
There aren't many situations where biological weapons are useful to nation states, especially ones with global economic and military footprint like the US, because it isn't selective enough about who it targets.
State actors already have the resources to do this. The disruption is from actors where the normal deterrence ladders don’t apply.
Because we’re the “good guys.”
We're not there quite yet, but I think within the decade at this pace it may be possible to create targeted bioweapons for purposes of targeted assassination or genocide. It's horrifying, but a world in which everyone has a superintelligence is a world where that will sometimes happen.
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1) The US is not the only country to deploy chemical weapons. Are you forgetting all of WW1? It's the whole reason chemical weapons are a no-no now.
2) The US didn't use chemicals weapons in Vietnam. Agent Orange was used to kill off foliage, not as a weapon against people, and the side effects were unintentional and affected US troops as much as Vietnamese.
Edit: I originally noted WW2, but I was thinking of WW1's widespread use of things like mustard gas, and the resulting Geneva agreements.