> As a thought experiment imagine you have a biochemical PhD expert on the phone with you giving you step by step instructions on how to grow some dangerous biotoxin, giving you feedback in real time and helping you troubleshoot. Would you be more successful with this expert than you'd be on your own?

I think there is some difference of degree, but not of kind. A determined terrorist can relatively easily find many ways to kill people en masse today, no AI needed. The bottleneck is usually the actual physical execution in the real world, not theoretical knowledge.

not an expert but because i assume you need the physical resources to do it in the first place?

you don't even need to make it a thought experiment, we have real world cases of this. Anthrax cultivation is easy enough that a first year biology student can do it, but it's in practice so dangerous and difficult to aerosolize without the correct equipment that nobody does it. The information to easily produce many bioweapons is online, the internet and instant global communication already democratized knowledge, why are terrorists still driving trucks into crowds?

Plans for 3d printed weapons are publicly available, same argument was made then, if everyone can download a blueprint for a gun, are we all going to get gunned down? Hasn't happened. There's two errors in this Bill Gates argument. One is thinking terrorists don't already have PhDs, secondly overrating intelligence because that's the only thing they're good at, and when they think of terrorists they just think of their own inflated egos, but turned evil. Which isn't how real terrorists operate