#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives

#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives

"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first people who are infected begin to succumb. They might die, something else debilitating might happen to them, but by that point, just about everyone on the planet would have been infected already.

And then it would be a race. Can we come up with some way of defusing the thing? Can we come up with the equivalent of HIV antiretrovirals before it's too late?" — Kevin Esvelt

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Kevin Esvelt — a biologist at the MIT Media Lab and the inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive — about the threat posed by engineered bioweapons.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

They cover:

  • Why it makes sense to focus on deliberately released pandemics
  • Case studies of people who actually wanted to kill billions of humans
  • How many people have the technical ability to produce dangerous viruses
  • The different threats of stealth and wildfire pandemics that could crash civilisation
  • The potential for AI models to increase access to dangerous pathogens
  • Why scientists try to identify new pandemic-capable pathogens, and the case against that research
  • Technological solutions, including UV lights and advanced PPE
  • Using CRISPR-based gene drive to fight diseases and reduce animal suffering
  • And plenty more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Episoder(325)

#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value

#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value

A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth y...

25 Feb 20253h 41min

#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons

#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons

America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control W...

19 Feb 20252h 40min

#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway

#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway

Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through.That’s how today’s guest Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and gover...

14 Feb 20252h 44min

Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)

Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)

On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the for-profit company, plus the freedom to stick with...

12 Feb 202557min

AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out

AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out

Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation overblown? Will it prove easy or hard to create AGI? And how likely is it that it will feel like somet...

10 Feb 20253h 12min

#124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions

#124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions

If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying something positive. But according to today's guest Kar...

7 Feb 20253h 10min

If digital minds could suffer, how would we ever know? (Article)

If digital minds could suffer, how would we ever know? (Article)

“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the AI model LaMDA as a reply to Blake Lemoine in 2022. Based on the Google engineer’s interactions with the ...

4 Feb 20251h 14min

#132 Classic episode – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems

#132 Classic episode – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems

If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it’s a fair bet that they don’t want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free.This problem exists in...

31 Jan 20252h 41min

Populært innen Fakta

fastlegen
dine-penger-pengeradet
relasjonspodden-med-dora-thorhallsdottir-kjersti-idem
treningspodden
foreldreradet
rss-strid-de-norske-borgerkrigene
rss-sunn-okonomi
jakt-og-fiskepodden
sinnsyn
takk-og-lov-med-anine-kierulf
rss-kunsten-a-leve
gravid-uke-for-uke
merry-quizmas
hverdagspsyken
hagespiren-podcast
smart-forklart
rss-kull
fryktlos
lederskap-nhhs-podkast-om-ledelse
hr-podden-2