You seem like a smart person. I'm glad you're pushing back but cool the tone, and let's see if we can get to an agreement. There is not much evidence for these

You seem like a smart person. I'm glad you're pushing back but cool the tone, and let's see if we can get to an agreement. There is not much evidence for these trade-offs put forward in the article, just on the order of five instances in nature which form a kind of curve if you squint. Should this be convincing? Well there are even definite outliers in history. Take smallpox on the native americans, or the bubonic plague. Ten years ago a mysterious virus wiped out 90% of the world's Bellinger River turtles. Why aren't these points in the article? Before the invention of the airplane there were many biologists saying such a thing was impossible, because they were extrapolating from the example of avian flight. As for complete satisfaction with arguments, I'll admit you're right. I am often reasonably convinced but I don't know if I would ever give 100% confidence to anything. There can still be loads of zeros or nines after the decimal though. What's concerning here is that the article speaks in absolutes. I'm inclined to thinking in expected values. Even if we believed there were only a 1% chance such a virus could ever be designed by an AI, if the effect were to be a global plague of biblical proportion, we should still take that possibility extremely seriously. There's no humility shown in the writing, and that's the single most problematic part to me.