YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Reid

lines on the record: 166
first: 2021-06-21
most recent: 2021-06-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I fully agree. I mean, that's why I'm fundamentally, it may not sound like it thus far, but I'm fundamentally very, very optimistic about our ability to short circuit this threat because there is, again, I'll stress the technological feasibility and the profound affordability of a relatively simple set of steps that we can take to preclude it. But we do have to take those steps. And so, you know, what I'm hoping to do and trying to do is inject a notion of what those steps are into the public conversation to do my small part to up the odds that that actually ends up happening. The danger with this one is it is exponential. And I think that our minds are fundamentally struggle to understand exponential math. It's just not something we're wired for. Our ancestors didn't confront exponential processes when they were growing up on the savannah. So it's not.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Preventing that. But even in their case, and I'm actually not counting 9 11, and that 9 11 is a different category in my mind. These are just personally suicidal pilots. In those cases, they only have a plane load of people that they're able to take with them. If we imagine a highly plausible and imaginable future in which symbiotools, they could be, that are amoral, that could be used for good or for ill, start embodying unbelievable sophistication and genius in the tool, in the easier and easier and easier to make tool, all those thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of scientist years start getting embodied in something that maybe as simple as hitting a print button, then that good guy technology can be hijacked by a bad person. And used in a very asymmetric way.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of good guy citizens in the United States with guns compared to bad guy citizens I'm sure is a crushingly overwhelmingly high ratio in favor of the good guys And so there is an asymmetry when you have powerful and lethal technology that gets so democratized and so proliferated in tools that are very, very easy to use, even by a knucklehead. When those tools get really easy to use by a knucklehead and they're really widespread, it becomes very, very hard to defend against all instances of usage. Now, the good news, quote-unquote, about mass shootings, if there is any, and there is some, is even the most brutal and carefully planning and well-armed mass shooter can only take so many victims. And same is true as there's been four instances that I'm aware of, of commercial pilots committing suicide by doubting their planes and taking all their passengers with them. These weren't Boeing engineers, you know, but like an army of Boeing engineers ultimately were not capable of”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good guys will almost inevitably outsmart and definitely outnumber the bad guys in most sort of smackdowns that we can imagine. But the good guys aren't going to be able to exert their advantages unless they have the imagination necessary to think about what the worst possible thing can be done by somebody whose own psychology is completely alien to their own. So that's a tricky, tricky thing to solve for. Now, in terms of whether the asymmetric power that a bad guy might have in the face of the overwhelming numerical advantage and competence advantage that the good guys have, you know, unfortunately I look at something like mass shootings as an example. I'm sure the guy who was responsible for the Vegas shooting or the Orlando shooting or any other shooting that we can imagine didn't know a whole lot about ballistics.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely share that. And that gives me a great deal of optimism that we will be able to short circuit the threat that malevolence in bio could pose to us. But we need to start creating those defensive systems or defensive layers, one of which we talked about far, far, far better surveillance in order to prevail.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so protein folding is an unbelievably important thing if you want to start thinking about therapeutics because it's the folding of the protein that tells us where the channels and the receptors and everything else are on that protein. And it's from that precise model if we can get to a precise model that you can start barraging it again in silicone with thousands, tens of thousands, millions of potential therapeutics and see what resolves the problems, the shortcomings that a misshapen protein, for instance, somebody with cystic fibrosis, how might we treat that? So I see nothing but good in that.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Monstrous computational challenge that we seem to make just the most glacial project on, I'm sorry, progress on for years and years. But I think there's a biannual competition, I think, at which people tackle the protein folding problem. And DeepMind's entrant both two years ago, like in 2018 and 2020, ruled the field.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continue to happen and will probably always continue to happen. And so that would be the danger of doing the work in Silico. If you end up with a list of like, boy, these are things we never want to see. That list leaks. And after the passage of some time certainly couldn't be done today, but after the passage of some time, lots and lots of people in academic labs going all the way down to the high school level are in a position to make it overly simplistic hit print on a genome and have the virus bearing that genome pop out on the other end. Then you got something to worry about. But in general, computational biology, I think, is incredibly important, particularly because the crushing majority of work that people are doing with the protein folding problem and other things are about creating therapeutics, about creating things that will help us live better, live longer, thrive, be more well, and so forth. And the protein folding problem is a”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't see any problem with that, except I do worry about the data security dimension of it because if you were doing really, really interesting in Silico Gaina Function research and you hit upon through a level of sophistication we don't currently have, but synthetic biology is an exponential technology, so capabilities that are utterly out of reach today will be attainable in five or six years. I think if you conjured up worst case genomes of viruses that don't exist in vivo anywhere, they're just in the computer space, but like, hey guys, this is the genetic sequence that would end the world, let's say, then you have to worry about the utter hackability of every computer network we can imagine. I mean, DataLeaks from the least likely places on the grandest possible scales have happened.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think computational biology is unbelievably exciting and promising field. And I think when you're doing things in silica as opposed to in vivo, the dangers plummet. You don't have a critter that can leak from a leaky lab.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vaccine being shut off, and then all the people who sat on the fence or sitting on the fence about whether or not they trust vaccines, that is going to push an incalculable number of people. That's going to be the last straw for we don't know how many hundreds of thousands are more likely millions of people to say, okay, tipping point here, I don't trust these vaccines. So by pausing that for whatever it was, 10 or 12 days and then flipping the switch as everybody who knew much about the situation knew was inevitable by flipping the on switch 12 days later, you're conveying certitude J&J bad to certitude J and J good in a period of just a few days and people just feel whipsawed and they're not part of the analysis”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Signal to people who don't read all 900 words in the New York Times piece that explains why it's being turned off, but just see the headline, which is a majority of people. There's a sudden like, oh my God, yikes.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was definitely suggestive data that indicated that there was a relationship. This wasn't just coincidental because I think all of the clotting incidents happened in women as opposed to men and kind of clustered in a certain age group. But does that call for shutting off the vaccine or does it call for leveling with the American public and saying we've had one fatality out of seven million? This is, let's just assume, substantially less than the likelihood of getting struck by lightning. Based on that information, and we're going to keep you posted because you can trust us to keep you posted based on that information, please decide whether you're comfortable with a Johnson& Johnson vaccine. That would have been one response, and I think people would have been able to parse those simple bits of data and make their own judgment. By turning it off, all of a sudden there's this dramatic”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a message that actually respected people and said this is why we're asking you not to do masks yet. And there's more to be seen would be less whipsawing and would bring people like they feel more like they're part of the conversation and they're being treated like adults than saying one day definitively masks suck and then X days later saying nope damn it wear masks and so I think framing things in terms of the probabilities which most people are easy to parse I mean more recent example which I just thought was batty was suspending the Johnson& Johnson vaccine for a very low single digit number of days in the United States based on the fact that I believe there had been seven-ish clotting incidents in roughly seven million people who had had the vaccine administered I believe one of which resulted in a fatality”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think part of the problem is it seems to me as an outsider that there was a bizarre unwillingness on the part of the CDC and other institutions to admit to, to frame and to contextualize uncertainty. Maybe they had a patronizing idea that these people need to be told. And when they're told, they need to be told with authority and a level of definitiveness and certitude that doesn't actually exist. And so when they whipsaw on recommendations like what you should do about masks, you know, when the CDC is kind of at the very beginning of the pandemic saying masks don't do anything, don't wear them when the real driver for that was we don't want these clowns going out and depleting Amazon of masks because they maybe needed in medical settings and we just don't know yet.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are starting to rise in different places. There's been a lot of work done with that. Most of it kind of academic and experimental, but some of it has been powerful enough to suggest that this could be a very powerful early warning system. There's a guy named Bill Lampos at University College London who basically did a very rigorous analysis that showed that symptom searches reliably predicted COVID outbreaks in the early days of the pandemic in given countries by as much as 16 days before the evidence started to accrue at a public health level. 16 days of forewarning can be monumentally important in the early days of an outbreak. And this is, you know, a very, very talented, but nonetheless very resource-constrained academic project. Imagine if that was something that was done with a NORAD-like budget.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if it's still at a we don't know, it gets bumped up to a national level. And it gets bumped very, very rapidly. So if this can be done in Nigeria, and it seems that it can be, there shouldn't be any inhibition for it to happen in most other places. And it should be affordable from a budgetary standpoint. And based on Sentinel's budget and adjusting things for things like very different cost of living, larger population, et cetera, I did a back of the envelope calculation that doing something like Sentinel in the US would be in the low billions of dollars. And wealthy countries, middle-income countries can't afford such a thing. Lower income countries should certainly be helped with that. But start with that level of detection. And then layer on top of that other interesting things like monitoring search engine traffic, search engine queries for evidence that strange clusters of symptoms.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joint venture between Harvard and MIT. The program is called Sentinel, and their objective is, and their plan is a very well-conceived plan, a methodical plan, is to do just that in areas of Nigeria that are particularly vulnerable to zoonotic diseases making the jump from animals to humans. But also there's just an unbelievable public health benefit from that. And it's sort of a three-tier system where clinicians in the field could very rapidly determine, do you have one of the infections of acute interest here, either because it's very common in this region, so we want to diagnose as many things as we can at the frontline, or because it's uncommon but unbelievably threatening like Ebola. So frontline worker can make that determination very, very rapidly. If it comes up as a we don't know, they bump it up to a level that's more like at a fully configured doctor's office or local hospital.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cause common cold? Or is it influenza? If it's influenza, is it influenza A versus B? Or is it a small handful of other more exotic but nonetheless sort of common respiratory infections that are out there? Developing a diagnostic panel to pinpoint all of that stuff, that's something that's well within our capabilities. That's much less a lift than creating mRNA vaccines, which obviously we proved capable of when we put our minds to it. Do that on a global basis. And I don't think that's irrational because the best prototype for this that I'm aware of isn't currently rolling out in Atherton, California or Fairfield County, Connecticut or some other wealthy place. The best prototype that I'm aware of this is rolling out right now in Nigeria. And it's a project that came out of the Broad Institute, which is, as I'm sure you know, but some listeners may not, is kind of like an academic.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of illness. And we are certainly at a point now, whereat with relatively minimal investment, we could develop in-clinic diagnostics that would be unbelievably effective at pinpointing what's going on in almost any disease when somebody walks into a doctor's office or a clinic. And better than that, this is a little bit further off, but it wouldn't cost tens of billions in research dollars. It would be a relatively modest and affordable budget in relation to the threat at home diagnostics that can really, really pinpoint, you know, okay, particularly with respiratory infections, because that is generally almost universally the mechanism of transmission for any serious pandemic. So somebody has a respiratory infection. Is it one of the significantly large handful of rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, and other things that”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's all kinds of things. And most of what I've thought about and written about, and again, discussed in that long bit with Sam is dual use. So most of the countermeasures that I've been thinking about and advocating for would be every bit as effective against zoonotic disease, a natural pandemic of some sort as an artificial one. The risk of an artificial one, even the near-term risk of an artificial one, ups the urgency around these measures immensely, but most of them would be broadly applicable. And so I think the first thing that we really want to do on a global scale is have a far, far, far more robust and globally transparent system of detection. And that can happen on a number of levels. The most obvious one is, you know, just in the blood of people who come into clinics exhibiting signs.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China because every country suffered massively from this unbelievable damages in terms of human lives and economic activity disrupted. The world would in some way present China with that bill. And when you take on top of that the natural disinclination for any authoritarian government to admit any fallibility and tolerate the possibility of any fallibility whatsoever, and you look at the relative opacity, even though they let a World Health Organization group in a couple months ago to run around, they didn't give that who group anywhere near the level of access it would be necessary to definitively say X happened versus Y. The level of opacity that surrounds those opening weeks and months of COVID in China, we just don't know.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly the magnitude of mistakes and compounding mistakes that went into Chernobyl was far, far, far greater. The consequence of COVID outweighs that the consequences of Chernobyl to a tremendous degree. And I think that particularly authoritarian governments are unbelievably reluctant to admit to any fallibility whatsoever. There's a long, long history of that across dozens and dozens of authoritarian governments. to be transparent, again, this is in the hypothetical world in which this was a leak, which again, I don't have, I don't personally have enough sophistication to have an opinion on the likelihood. But in the hypothetical world in which it was a leak, the global reaction and the amount of global animus and the amount of the decline in global respect that would happen towards”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then that pause was lifted. So, again, none of this is irrational. You could certainly see the folks at WIV saying, gain a function interesting vector, coronavirus virus, unlike H5N1, very contagious. We're in a nation that has had terrible run-ins with coronavirus. Why don't we do a little gain of function on this? And then like all labs at all levels, one could imagine this lab leaking. It's not an impossibility and very, very level-headed people have said that, you know, who've looked at it much more deeply do believe in that outcome.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And weeks after the outbreak that's basically been imposed by the Chinese government, that we just don't know. So it feels like a substantially or greater than 1% possibility to me, looking at it from the outside. That's something that one could imagine. Now we're going to the realm of thought experiment, not me decreeing this is what happened, but if they're studying coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and there is this precedent of gain of function research that's been done on something that is remarkably uncontagious to humans, whereas we know coronavirus is contagious to humans, I could definitely, and there is this global consensus, you know, certainly was the case, you know, two or three years ago when this work might have started, there just seems to be this global consensus that gain of function is fine. U.S. paused funding for a little while, but paused funding. They never said private actors couldn't do it. It was just a pause of NIH funding.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology. I believe it's the only BSL4 in China. I could be wrong about that. But it definitely had a history that alarmed very sophisticated U.S. diplomats and others who were in contact with the lab and were aware of what it was doing long before COVID hit the world. And so there are diplomatic cables that have been declassified. I believe one sophisticated scientist or other observer said that WIV is a ticking time bomb. And I believe it's also been pretty reasonably established that coronaviruses were a topic of great interest at WIV, SARS obviously came out of China, and that's a coronavirus that would make an enormous amount of sense for it to be studied there. And there is so much opacity about what happened in the early days.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the mere possibility that it did leak from a lab is evidence enough, again, for the hypothetical rational leaders watching this simple PowerPoint, if you could put the possibility at 1% and you look at the unbelievable destructive power that COVID had, that should be an overwhelmingly powerful argument for excluding it. Now, as to whether or not that was a leak, some very, very level, I don't know enough about all of the factors in the Bayesian analysis and so forth that has gone into people making the pro argument of that. So I don't pretend to be an expert on that, and I don't have a point of view. I just don't know. But what we can say is it is entirely possible for a couple of reasons. One is that there is a BSL4 lab in Wuhan.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have investors who don't want to go to jail for the rest of their lives. I think that would have a major, major dampening impact on it.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or leaking that came out of a BSL 4 level lab in the UK. Several other things. Talking about the utter virulence that could result from gain of function and say, folks, can we agree that this just shouldn't happen? I mean, if we were able to agree on the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which we were, by a weapons convention, which we did agree on, we the world for the most part, I believe agreement could be found there, but it's going to take people in leadership of a couple of very powerful countries to get to consensus amongst them and then to decide we're going to get everybody together and browbeat them into banning this stuff. Now, that doesn't make it entirely impossible that somebody might do this. But in well-regulated, you know, carefully watched over fiduciary environments like federally funded academic research, anything going on in the government itself, things going on in companies that”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's also hard to imagine a more security capable organization than the United States military. We can joke all we want about inefficiencies in the military and, you know, 24,000 dollar wrenches and so forth, but pretty capable when it comes to that. Despite that level of focus and concern and competence just days after the 9-11 attack, something comes from the inside of our military and industrial compacts and ends up in the office of someone I believe, the Senate majority leader somewhere in the line of presidential succession. That tells us everything in league. So again, think of a level-headed conversation between powerful leaders in a diversity of countries, thinking through like I can imagine a very simple PowerPoint revealing, you know, just discussing briefly things like the Anthrax League, things like this foot and mouth disease outbreak that were”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leaked from a high-security US Army lab. And where did it leak to, this highly dangerous substance that was kept under lock and key by a very security-minded organization? Well, it leaked to places including the Senate majority leader's office, Tom Daschel's office. I think it was Senator Leahy's office, certain publications, including bizarrely the National Inquirer. But let's go to the Senate majority leader's office. It is hard to imagine a more security-minded country than the United States two weeks after the 9-11 attack. I mean, it doesn't get more security-minded than that.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would be easy enough for level-headed people in all of the countries, level-headed governmental people in all the countries that realistically could support such a program to agree we don't want this to happen because all labs leak. I mean, an example that I use, I actually use it in the piece I did with Sam Harris as well, is the anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001. I mean, talk about an example of the least likely lab leaking into the least likely place. This was shortly after 9-11 for folks who don't remember it. And it was a very, very lethal strand of anthrax that, as it turned out, based on the forensic genomic work that was done and so forth, absolutely leaked from a high security U.S. Army lab. Probably the one at Fort Dietrich in Maryland. It might have been another one, but who cares?”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, I'm going to use gain of function in the relatively narrow context of what we're saying. You could say almost anything that you do to make biology more effective is gain of function. So within the narrow confines of what we're discussing.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever fraction of 1% that was, you would come up with a staggering cost, staggering expected cost for this work. So it should never have been carried out. Now, you might make an argument if you said, if you believed that H5N1 in nature is on an inevitable path to airborne transmission, and it's only going to be a small number of years, A, and B, if it makes that transition, there is one set of changes to its metabolic pathways and its genomic code and so forth. One, that we have discovered. So it is going to go from point A, which is where it is right now, to point B, we have reliably engineered. It's all systems go for gain of function at this point, which I find very troubling.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't unleash it into the world, they didn't inject it into humans to see what would happen. And so for those two reasons, we don't really know how contagious it might have been. But if it was as contagious as COVID, that could be a civilization threatening pathogen. And why would you do it? Well, the people who did it were good guys. They were virologists. I believe their agendas, they explained it, was much as you said, let's figure out what a worst case scenario might look like so we can understand it better. But my understanding is in both cases it was done in BSL3 labs. And so potential of leak, significantly non-zero, hopefully way below 1%, but significantly non-zero. And when you look at the consequences of an escape in terms of human lives, destruction of a large portion of the economy, et cetera, and you do an expected value calculation.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they basically passed it, I think in both cases, they passed it through a large number of ferrets. And so this wasn't like CRISPR. There wasn't even in CRISPR back in those days. This was relatively straightforward, selecting for a particular outcome. And after guiding the path and passing them through, again, I believe it was a series of ferrets, they did, in fact, come up with a version of H5N1 that is capable of airborne transmission.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're interacting intensely with Fowl, who, as it turns out, have H5N1, that's when the jump comes. But there's no airborne transmission that we're aware of human to human. I mean, not that it just doesn't exist. a relentless survey of the number of H5N1 cases. I think they do it every year. I saw one 10-year series where I think it was like 500 fatalities over the course of a decade. And that's a drop in the bucket. Kind of fun fact. I believe the typical lethality from lightning over 10 years is 70,000 deaths. So we've been getting struck by lightning, pretty low risk. H5N1, much, much lower than that. What happened in these experiments is the experimenters in both cases set out to make H5N1 that would be contagious, that could create airborne transmission.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did gain a function research on something called H5N1 flu? H5N1 is something that at least on a lethality basis makes COVID look like a kitten. You know, COVID, according to the World Health Organization, has a case fatality rate somewhere between half a percent and 1%. H5N1 is closer to 60%, 6-0. And so that's actually even slightly more lethal than Ebola. This is a very, very, very scary pathogen. The good news about H5N1, it is that it is barely, barely contagious. And I believe it is in no way contagious human to human. It requires very, very, very deep contact with birds, in most cases chickens. And so if you're a chicken farmer and you spend an enormous amount of time around them and perhaps you get into situations in which you get a break in your skin,”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So that would be the logic behind doing it. And so gain a function can mean a lot of different things viewed through a certain lens, gained of function research could be what you do when you create, you know, GMOs, when you create hardy strains of corn that are resistant to pesticides. I mean, you could view that as gain of function. So I'm going to refer to gain of function in a relatively narrow sense, which is actually the sense that the term is usually used, which is in some way magnifying capabilities of microorganisms to make them more dangerous, whether it's more transmissible or more deadly. And in that line of research, I'll use an example from 2011 because it's very illustrative and it's also very chilling. Back in 2011, two separate labs independently of one another. I assume there was some kind of communication between them, but they were basically independent projects, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Academic scientific environment creating something malevolent. Again, there's protections that we can take both at the level of synbio architecture, the hardening the entire synbio ecosystem against terrible things being made that we don't want to have out there by rogue actors to early detection, to lots and lots of other things that we can do to dramatically mitigate that risk. And I think we do both of those things, decide that, no, we're not going to experimentally make annihilating pathogens in leaky labs. And B, yes, we are going to take countermeasures that are going to cost a fraction of our annual defense budget to preclude their creation than I think both risks get managed down. But if you take one set of precautions and not the other, then the thing that you have not taken precautions against immediately becomes the more”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost all of the measures that are taken in biosafety level anything labs are designed to prevent accidental leaks. What happens if you have a malevolent insider? And we could talk about the psychology and the motivations of what would make a malevolent insider who wants to release something annihilating in a bit. I'm sure that we will. But what if you have a malevolent insider virtually none of the standards that go into biosafety level one, two, three, and four are about preventing somebody hijacking the process? I mean, some of them are, but they're mainly designed against accidents. They're imperfect against accidents. And if this kind of work starts happening in lots and lots of labs with every lab you add, the odds of there being a malevolent insight are naturally increased arithmetically as the number of labs goes up. Now, on the front of somebody outside of a government academic or scientific traditional government scientist,”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree on. But the easiest way, the easier risk to manage is that of, hey guys, let's not develop pathogens that if they escape from a lab could annihilate us. There's no line of research that justifies that. And in my view, I mean, that's the point of perspective we need to have. We'd have to collectively agree that there's no line of research that justifies that. The reason why I believe that would be a highly rational conclusion is even the highest level of biosafety lab in the world, biosafety level four. And there are not a lot of BSL4 labs in the world. Things can can and have leaked out of BSL4 labs. And some of the work”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“pathogen development do we as a society decide is acceptable in the realms of academia government or private industry and if we decide as a society that it's perfectly okay for people with varying research agendas to create pathogens that if released could wipe out humanity if we think that's fine and if that kind of works starts happening in you know one lab five labs 50 labs 500 labs in one country then 10 countries then 70 countries or whatever that risk of a boo boo starts rising astronomically and this won't be a spoiler alert based on the way that i presented those two things but i think it's unbelievably important to manage both of those risks the easier one to manage although it wouldn't be simple by any stretch because it would have to be something that all nations”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will both of them are in danger? And I think the question of which is more likely has to do with two things. One, do we take a lot of methodical, affordable foresighted steps that we are absolutely capable of taking right now to forestall the risk of a bad actor infecting us with something that could have annihilating impacts? And in the episode you referenced with Sam, we talked a great deal about that. So do we take those steps? And if we take those steps, I think the danger of malevolent rogue actors doing us in with SynBio can plummet. But, you know, it's always a question of if and we have a bad, bad, and very long track record of hitting the snooze bar after different natural pandemics have attacked us. So that's variable number one. Variable number two is how much experimentation and”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of leading to our self destruction than something running amok with super AI, which I believe is a real possibility and one we need to be concerned about. But in the 30-year timeframe, I think it's a lesser one, or nuclear weapons or anything else that I can think of.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm comfortable predicting, let's say, 30 years, I would say the most likely route to self-destruction would be synthetic biology. And I always say that with the gigantic caveat, a very important one, that I find, and I'll abbreviate synthetic biology to synbio just to save us some syllables, I believe synbio offers us simply stunning promise that we would be fools to deny ourselves. So I'm not an anti-Synbio person by any stretch. I mean, Synbio has unbelievable odds of helping us beat cancer, helping us rescue the environment, helping us do things that we would currently find imponderable. So it's electrifying the field. But in the wrong hands, those hands either being incompetent or being malevolent in the wrong hands, synthetic biology to me has a much, much greater odds, has much, much greater odds.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's see. A hundred years, it's hard for me to comfortably predict out that far. And it's something I give a lot more thought to, I think, than normal folks simply because I'm a science fiction writer. And I feel with the acceleration of technological progress, it's really hard to foresee more than just a few decades. I mean, comparing today's world to that of 1921, where we are right now a century later, it would have been so unforeseeable. And I just don't know what's going to happen, particularly with exponential technologies. I mean, our intuitions reliably defeat ourselves with exponential technologies like computing and synthetic biology and, you know, how we might destroy ourselves in the hundred year time frame might have everything to do with breakthroughs and nanotechnology 40 years from now and then how rapidly those breakthroughs accelerate. But in the nearer term,”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spend almost all the time in a place that's intermediate between those but leaning toward gratitude. I spend almost all the time in a state of optimism that this thing that I have, I like, I like quite a bit, and I can make it better and better and better with every time I go through it. I spend most of my time in a state of optimism.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe it's true of woodwork. My dad was an amateur woodworker, and he spent a huge amount of time on sanding and polishing at the end. So I think a great deal of the sparkle comes from that part of the process, any creative process.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I write because I edit and I spend just relentlessly polishing and pruning. And sometimes on the micro level of just like does the rhythm of the sentence feel right? Do I need to carve a syllable or something so it can land, like as micro as that to as macro as like, okay, I'm done, but the book is 750 pages long and it's way too bloated. I need to lop a third out of it. Problems on those two orders of magnitude and everything in between, that is an enormous amount of my time. And I also write music, write and record and produce music. And they're the ratio is even higher. Every minute that I spend or my band spends laying down that original audio, it's a very high proportion of hours that go into just making it all hang together and sound just right. So I think that's true of a lot of creators. Process.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source