> One just has to accept that the biomedicine people can kill everybody This is falling back into the binary thinking of can vs cannot. I want to re-emphasize

> One just has to accept that the biomedicine people can kill everybody This is falling back into the binary thinking of can vs cannot. I want to re-emphasize probabilities, magnitudes and speeds. If 1 out of 1 billion people are insane enough to do it, but only 20k people can do it, that's (1-1e-9)^20000 = 0.99998 chance that it won't happen. If you invent a technology that puts this capability in the hands of 1 billion people, that probability changes to 0.36789 that it won't happen. Over a sufficient number of generations (N) of people, the probability that it won't happen goes down to 0.36789^N, a very small number. On a long enough time horizon (say, 200 years), we are dead. It's why nuclear proliferation is bad. If only 2 countries have nukes, the chances of a nuclear first strike are (1-p)^2. We probably survive because it probably won't happen. If every country has nukes, it becomes (1-p)^200 (this isn't exactly correct because superpowers have more nukes, and the probability of war between any pair of countries isn't i.i.d. with another pair of countries, among other assumptions, but it's fine for a conceptual first scratch). If every person has nukes, it's (1-p)^8billion, and we are definitely dead. This idea that decentralization is automatically good is quite silly. It is good in many areas. But decentralized nukes or decentralized gain of function virus research is categorically bad. You really have to scrutinize what it is you're making accessible.