#463 — Privatizing the Apocalypse
A detailed discussion about Deep Vision, a canceled $125 million USAID program that would have collected 10,000 unknown viruses from remote locations, characterized their deadliness, and published their genomes publicly. The speakers describe their successful whistleblowing campaign that led to the program's termination.
Summary
The conversation focuses on Deep Vision, a USAID program that the speakers viewed as extremely dangerous and successfully campaigned to shut down. Deep Vision had three components: virus hunting (collecting ~10,000 unknown viruses from remote locations like bat caves in developing countries), characterization (testing to determine which were most dangerous), and publication (making the genomes of deadly viruses publicly available). The speaker argues this was dangerous because laboratories leak, vaccine development from hypothetical threats is ineffective, and publishing deadly virus genomes would give 30,000 people worldwide the ability to recreate pandemic-grade pathogens. The whistleblowing effort involved multiple high-profile individuals including Tristan Harris, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Chelsea Clinton, as well as bipartisan political pressure from senators like Lindsey Graham, James Risch, and Rand Paul. The program was eventually defanged and formally killed in September 2023. The speakers argue that while COVID was relatively benign compared to potential threats, Deep Vision could have enabled much worse scenarios involving multiple simultaneous pandemics. They emphasize that this dangerous idea came from well-intentioned people, making it more concerning as AI and other technologies will soon enable many more people to conceive and implement similarly destructive projects.
About this episode
<p dir="ltr">Sam Harris speaks with Rob Reid about biosecurity, pandemic risk, and the alarming fragility of our defenses against biological catastrophe. They discuss the controversial USAID program DEEP VZN, the dangers of gain-of-function research, open science norms that could arm bad actors, the role of AI in accelerating bioweapon development, biosurveillance tools, lone wolf bioterrorists, chaos agents, and other topics.</p> <p>If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at <a href="http://samharris.org/subscribe">samharris.org/subscribe</a>.</p>
Key Insights
- The Deep Vision program would have collected 10,000 unknown viruses from remote locations and published their genomes publicly, potentially giving 30,000 people worldwide the ability to recreate deadly pathogens
- The speaker argues that isolated bat caves are safer repositories for dangerous pathogens than laboratories, since all laboratory security levels demonstrably leak at unknown rates
- Creating vaccines for hypothetical pandemic threats discovered through virus hunting is not practically useful because safety and efficacy cannot be tested without actual outbreaks
- The successful campaign to kill Deep Vision involved bipartisan political pressure and a coalition including Tristan Harris, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Chelsea Clinton, and multiple senators
- The speaker contends that in 2021, fewer than 10 entities worldwide had the resources to implement something as potentially destructive as Deep Vision, but this number will dramatically increase as technology advances
Topics
Transcript
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. With the best of intentions. With the best of, actually literally with the best of intentions, but what a terrible…
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