Comment by h2odragon
4 years ago
> ricin is (fortunately) not all that easy to turn into a weapon, and the people who try to do it are generally somewhat disconnected from reality (and also from technical proficiency).
Of course that fact was no barrier to much hype about the "dangers" it posed, either. I suspect the same now; that we have more to fear from the fear junkie propaganda than the actual facts.
I personally fear the lone-wolf attack drastically reducing in cost and effort. Where it would once be cost-prohibitive to design and manufacture your own nerve gas or lethal virus, these days with AI/ML and Crispr-cas and the like, it feels like any intelligent, deranged person wanting to take as many people to the grave with him has the tools to do just that.
Intelligent and deranged persons already have the tools to make way more casualties with way less effort using guns and/or explosives. The "problem" for them is that people who get sufficiently deranged to think that killing a few hundred (or even thousand) people will meaningfully solve the problem they are upset about will also be sufficiently deranged that their ability to reason coherently will be drastically reduced.
Would they? I'm not seeing that as necessarily true. The Unabomber seems like a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
Or look at mass shooting incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
The Las Vegas shooting was rationally planned and carried out. He managed to shoot nearly 500 people, killing 60.
They did happen to pick conventional weapons. But is that because of rational choice, or just familiarity and availability? Imagine somebody like Kaczynski, but instead of being an award-winning young mathematician, he was an award-winning industrial chemist or genomics student.
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I think this is inevitable and something we will grapple with in coming decades. Especially around genetic engineering of viruses.