...reads the header to an article in today's Financial Times (image at bottom of this page). It's a short article, but a frightening one:
Biotech is now within the grasp of hobbyists who can experiment with home-brewed opiates, DIY biohacks and even a mail order gene-editing kit to double the size of a tree frog. ...Modified microbes could damage ecoystems or trigger antimicrobial resistance.... A 'genetic engineering home lab kit' is marketed for just $1845. Lex, Financial Times (subscription), 24 JuneHow should we deal the disasters that this, or any other technology, known or unknown, could unleash? We can't anticipate exactly where disasters will come from; our tendency is to let government take the lead. But government has little incentive or capacity to get it right - as we are seeing right now. Perhaps it's too much to expect government, an inherently big, cumbersome organisation, to deal efficiently with unforseeable catastrophes. It doesn't appear to be doing a great job managing even those that we know about but that are happening in ways that do not make television news: things like the always-present potential for a nuclear exchange; or climate change.
Yet there are things that only government can do, and things it does well. Managing disasters that are already happening, and have a readily identifiable cause and effect is one such. Raising the revenue (or, as now, borrowing) on a large enough scale to mitigate disasters is another. But what government cannot, and has no incentive to, do well is deal with complex problems that require diverse, adaptive solutions. Lex says that reinsurer Swiss Re 'reckons there is scope for havoc' arising from amateur biotech, and its dangers appear in the company's annual round-up of emerging risks. Right, and you'd think it would be in insurance companies' interests to do something to forestall such havoc. Maybe it is, in the short term, but if they did too much what would happen to insurance premiums and their revenue? Perhaps quelling brewing calamities wouldn't fit their business model. I don't really know.
But I can offer what I think is a less speculative solution: Disaster Prevention Bonds. These could be backed by government and swelled by contributions from philanthropists, NGOs and the public, and made redeemable only when no major disaster befalls human beings over a period of a decade or more. The type of disaster doesn't have to be foreseen or foreseeable. Backed by sufficiently large funds, the bonds would encourage investors to do whatever is possible to avert major disasters, including being alert to embryonic threats, such as those posed by DIY biotech. Incentives are important. Some people today benefit by doing things that reduce the likelihood of certain, specified disasters. But only specified disasters and, besides, there aren't that many such people, that's partly because the rewards on offer do not correlate with a successful, sustained, disaster-free outcome. That's where Disaster Prevention Bonds could help.
I am grateful to Lex, not only for giving me something to blog about, and all of us something else to worry about, but also for this quote from Eliezer Yudokovsky:
Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.
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