WEBVTT

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So, there's about
seven and a half billion of us.

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The World Health Organization tells us
that 300 million of us are depressed,

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and about 800,000 people
take their lives every year.

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A tiny subset of them choose
a profoundly nihilistic route,

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which is they die in the act of killing
as many people as possible.

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These are some famous recent examples.

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And here's a less famous one.
It happened about nine weeks ago.

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If you don't remember it,

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it's because there's
a lot of this going on.

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Wikipedia just last year
counted 323 mass shootings

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in my home country, the United States.

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Not all of those shooters were suicidal,

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not all of them were maximizing
their death tolls,

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but many, many were.

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An important question becomes:
What limits do these people have?

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Take the Vegas shooter.

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He slaughtered 58 people.

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Did he stop there because he'd had enough?

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No, and we know this because
he shot and injured another 422 people

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who he surely would have
preferred to kill.

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We have no reason to think
he would have stopped at 4,200.

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In fact, with somebody this nihilistic,
he may well have gladly killed us all.

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We don't know.

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What we do know is this:

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when suicidal murderers really go all in,

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technology is the force multiplier.

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Here's an example.

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Several years back, there was a rash
of 10 mass school attacks in China

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carried out with things
like knives and hammers and cleavers,

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because guns are really hard to get there.

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By macabre coincidence,
this last attack occurred

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just hours before the massacre
in Newtown, Connecticut.

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But that one American attack killed
roughly the same number of victims

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as the 10 Chinese attacks combined.

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So we can fairly say,
knife: terrible; gun: way worse.

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And airplane: massively worse,

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as pilot Andreas Lubitz showed
when he forced 149 people

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to join him in his suicide,

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smashing a plane into the French Alps.

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And there are other examples of this.

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And I'm afraid there are far more deadly
weapons in our near future than airplanes,

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ones not made of metal.

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So let's consider the apocalyptic
dynamics that will ensue

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if suicidal mass murder hitches a ride
on a rapidly advancing field

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that for the most part holds
boundless promise for society.

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Somewhere out there in the world,
there's a tiny group of people

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who would attempt, however ineptly,

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to kill us all if they
could just figure out how.

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The Vegas shooter may or may not
have been one of them,

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but with seven and a half billion of us,

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this is a nonzero population.

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There's plenty of suicidal
nihilists out there.

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We've already seen that.

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There's people with severe mood disorders
that they can't even control.

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There are people who have just suffered
deranging traumas, etc. etc.

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As for the corollary group,

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its size was simply zero forever
until the Cold War,

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when suddenly, the leaders
of two global alliances

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attained the ability to blow up the world.

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The number of people
with actual doomsday buttons

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has stayed fairly stable since then.

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But I'm afraid it's about to grow,

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and not just to three.

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This is going off the charts.

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I mean, it's going to look
like a tech business plan.

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(Laughter)

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And the reason is,

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we're in the era
of exponential technologies,

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which routinely take
eternal impossibilities

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and make them the actual superpowers
of one or two living geniuses

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and -- this is the big part --

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then diffuse those powers
to more or less everybody.

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Now, here's a benign example.

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If you wanted to play checkers
with a computer in 1952,

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you literally had to be that guy,

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then commandeer one of the world's
19 copies of that computer,

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then used your Nobel-adjacent brain
to teach it checkers.

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That was the bar.

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Today, you just need to know someone
who knows someone who owns a telephone,

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because computing
is an exponential technology.

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So is synthetic biology,

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which I'll now refer to as "synbio."

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And in 2011, a couple of researchers
did something every bit as ingenious

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and unprecedented as the checkers trick

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with H5N1 flu.

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This is a strain that kills
up to 60 percent of the people it infects,

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more than Ebola.

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But it is so uncontagious

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that it's killed fewer
than 50 people since 2015.

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So these researchers edited H5N1's genome

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and made it every bit as deadly,
but also wildly contagious.

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The news arm of one of the world's
top two scientific journals

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said if this thing got out,
it would likely cause a pandemic

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with perhaps millions of deaths.

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And Dr. Paul Keim said

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he could not think of an organism
as scary as this,

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which is the last thing
I personally want to hear

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from the Chairman of the National
Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity.

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And by the way, Dr. Keim also said this --

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["I don't think anthrax
is scary at all compared to this."]

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And he's also one of these.

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[Anthrax expert] (Laughter)

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Now, the good news about the 2011 biohack

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is that the people who did it
didn't mean us any harm.

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They're virologists.

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They believed they were advancing science.

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The bad news is that technology
does not freeze in place,

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and over the next few decades,

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their feat will become trivially easy.

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In fact, it's already way easier,
because as we learned yesterday morning,

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just two years after they did their work,

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the CRISPR system was harnessed
for genome editing.

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This was a radical breakthrough

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that makes gene editing
massively easier --

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so easy that CRISPR
is now taught in high schools.

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And this stuff is moving
quicker than computing.

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That slow, stodgy white line up there?

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That's Moore's law.

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That shows us how quickly
computing is getting cheaper.

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That steep, crazy-fun green line,

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that shows us how quickly
genetic sequencing is getting cheaper.

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Now, gene editing
and synthesis and sequencing,

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they're different disciplines,
but they're tightly related.

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And they're all moving
in these headlong rates.

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And the keys to the kingdom
are these tiny, tiny data files.

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That is an excerpt of H5N1's genome.

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The whole thing can fit
on just a few pages.

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And yeah, don't worry, you can Google this
as soon as you get home.

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It's all over the internet, right?

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And the part that made it contagious

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could well fit on a single Post-it note.

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And once a genius makes a data file,

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any idiot can copy it,

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distribute it worldwide

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or print it.

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And I don't just mean print it on this,

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but soon enough, on this.

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So let's imagine a scenario.

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Let's say it's 2026,
to pick an arbitrary year,

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and a brilliant virologist,
hoping to advance science

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and better understand pandemics,

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designs a new bug.

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It's as contagious as chicken pox,

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it's as deadly as Ebola,

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and it incubates for months and months
before causing an outbreak,

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so the whole world can be infected
before the first sign of trouble.

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Then, her university gets hacked.

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And of course,
this is not science fiction.

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In fact, just one recent US indictment

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documents the hacking
of over 300 universities.

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So that file with the bug's genome on it
spreads to the internet's dark corners.

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And once a file is out there,
it never comes back --

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just ask anybody who runs
a movie studio or a music label.

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So now maybe in 2026,

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it would take a true genius
like our virologist

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to make the actual living critter,

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but 15 years later,

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it may just take a DNA printer
you can find at any high school.

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And if not?

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Give it a couple of decades.

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So, a quick aside:

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Remember this slide here?

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Turn your attention to these two words.

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If somebody tries this
and is only 0.1 percent effective,

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eight million people die.

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That's 2,500 9/11s.

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Civilization would survive,

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but it would be permanently disfigured.

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So this means we need
to be concerned about anybody

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who has the faintest shot on goal,

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not just geniuses.

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So today, there's a tiny
handful of geniuses

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who probably could make a doomsday bug

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that's .1-percent effective
and maybe even a little bit more.

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They tend to be stable and successful
and so not part of this group.

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So I guess I'm sorta kinda
barely OK-ish with that.

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But what about after technology improves

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and diffuses

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and thousands of life science
grad students are enabled?

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Are every single one of them
going to be perfectly stable?

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Or how about a few years after that,

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where every stress-ridden
premed is fully enabled?

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At some point in that time frame,

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these circles are going to intersect,

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because we're now starting to talk about
hundreds of thousands of people

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throughout the world.

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And they recently included that guy
who dressed up like the Joker

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and shot 12 people to death
at a Batman premiere.

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That was a neuroscience PhD student

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with an NIH grant.

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OK, plot twist:

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I think we can actually survive this one
if we start focusing on it now.

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And I say this, having spent
countless hours

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interviewing global leaders in synbio

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and also researching their work
for science podcasts I create.

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I have come to fear their work, in case
I haven't gotten that out there yet --

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(Laughter)

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but more than that,
to revere its potential.

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This stuff will cure cancer,
heal our environment

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and stop our cruel treatment
of other creatures.

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So how do we get all this without,
you know, annihilating ourselves?

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First thing: like it or not,
synbio is here,

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so let's embrace the technology.

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If we do a tech ban,

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that would only hand
the wheel to bad actors.

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Unlike nuclear programs,

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biology can be practiced invisibly.

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Massive Soviet cheating
on bioweapons treaties

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made that very clear, as does every
illegal drug lab in the world.

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Secondly, enlist the experts.

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Let's sign them up and make more of them.

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For every million and one
bioengineers we have,

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at least a million of them
are going to be on our side.

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I mean, Al Capone
would be on our side in this one.

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The bar to being a good guy
is just so low.

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And massive numerical
advantages do matter,

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even when a single bad guy
can inflict grievous harm,

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because among many other things,

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they allow us to exploit
the hell out of this:

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we have years and hopefully decades
to prepare and prevent.

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The first person to try something awful --
and there will be somebody --

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may not even be born yet.

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Next, this needs to be an effort
that spans society,

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and all of you need to be a part of it,

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because we cannot ask
a tiny group of experts

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to be responsible for both containing
and exploiting synthetic biology,

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because we already tried that
with the financial system,

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and our stewards became
massively corrupted

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as they figured out
how they could cut corners,

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inflict massive, massive risks
on the rest of us

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and privatize the gains,

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becoming repulsively wealthy

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while they stuck us
with the $22 trillion bill.

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And more recently --

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(Applause)

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Are you the ones who have gotten
the thank-you letters?

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I'm still waiting for mine.

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I just figured they were
too busy to be grateful.

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And much more recently,

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online privacy started looming
as a huge issue,

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and we basically outsourced it.

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And once again:

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privatized gains, socialized losses.

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Is anybody else sick of this pattern?

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(Applause)

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So we need a more inclusive way
to safeguard our prosperity,

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our privacy

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and soon, our lives.

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So how do we do all of this?

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Well, when bodies fight pathogens,

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they use ingenious immune systems,

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which are very complex and multilayered.

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Why don't we build one of these
for the whole damn ecosystem?

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There's a year of TED Talks that could
be given on this first critical layer.

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So these are just a couple
of many great ideas that are out there.

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Some R and D muscle

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could take the very primitive
pathogen sensors that we currently have

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and put them on a very steep
price performance curve

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that would quickly become ingenious

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and networked

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and gradually as widespread
as smoke detectors and even smartphones.

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On a very related note:

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vaccines have all kinds of problems

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when it comes to manufacturing
and distribution,

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and once they're made, they can't adapt
to new threats or mutations.

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We need an agile biomanufacturing base

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extending into every single pharmacy
and maybe even our homes.

00:13:46.066 --> 00:13:49.725
Printer technology for vaccines
and medicines is within reach

00:13:49.749 --> 00:13:51.732
if we prioritize it.

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00:13:51.756 --> 00:13:53.826
Next, mental health.

00:13:53.850 --> 00:13:56.705
Many people who commit
suicidal mass murder

00:13:56.729 --> 00:14:01.213
suffer from crippling,
treatment-resistant depression or PTSD.

00:14:01.237 --> 00:14:05.308
We need noble researchers
like Rick Doblin working on this,

00:14:05.332 --> 00:14:09.270
but we also need the selfish jerks
who are way more numerous

00:14:09.294 --> 00:14:15.314
to appreciate the fact that acute
suffering will soon endanger all of us,

00:14:15.338 --> 00:14:17.068
not just those afflicted.

00:14:17.092 --> 00:14:20.542
Those jerks will then
join us and Al Capone

00:14:20.566 --> 00:14:22.820
in fighting this condition.

00:14:23.409 --> 00:14:29.027
Third, each and every one of us
can be and should be a white blood cell

00:14:29.051 --> 00:14:30.901
in this immune system.

00:14:31.280 --> 00:14:34.755
Suicidal mass murderers
can be despicable, yes,

00:14:34.779 --> 00:14:38.888
but they're also terribly
broken and sad people,

00:14:38.912 --> 00:14:41.332
and those of us who aren't
need to do what we can

00:14:41.356 --> 00:14:43.443
to make sure nobody goes unloved.

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00:14:44.573 --> 00:14:49.257
(Applause)

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00:14:49.711 --> 00:14:52.280
Next, we need to make
fighting these dangers

00:14:52.304 --> 00:14:55.064
core to the discipline
of synthetic biology.

00:14:55.088 --> 00:14:57.455
There are companies out there
that at least claim

00:14:57.479 --> 00:15:00.381
they let their engineers
spend 20 percent of their time

00:15:00.405 --> 00:15:01.799
doing whatever they want.

00:15:01.823 --> 00:15:04.475
What if those who hire bioengineers

00:15:04.499 --> 00:15:05.667
and become them

00:15:05.691 --> 00:15:09.572
give 20 percent of their time
to building defenses for the common good?

00:15:11.397 --> 00:15:12.768
Not a bad idea, right?

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00:15:12.792 --> 00:15:14.010
(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:14.034 --> 00:15:16.674
Then, finally: this won't be any fun.

00:15:16.698 --> 00:15:20.645
But we need to let our minds
go to some very, very dark places,

00:15:20.669 --> 00:15:24.081
and thank you for letting me
take you there this evening.

00:15:24.105 --> 00:15:26.472
We survived the Cold War

00:15:26.496 --> 00:15:30.849
because every one of us understood
and respected the danger,

00:15:30.873 --> 00:15:33.260
in part, because we had spent decades

00:15:33.284 --> 00:15:35.761
telling ourselves terrifying ghost stories

00:15:35.785 --> 00:15:37.745
with names like "Dr. Strangelove"

00:15:37.769 --> 00:15:39.384
and "War Games."

00:15:39.408 --> 00:15:41.704
This is no time to remain calm.

00:15:41.728 --> 00:15:44.796
This is one of those rare times
when it's incredibly productive

00:15:44.820 --> 00:15:47.478
to freak the hell out --

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00:15:47.502 --> 00:15:50.271
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:50.295 --> 00:15:52.392
to come up with some ghost stories

00:15:52.416 --> 00:15:57.281
and use our fear as fuel
to fight this danger.

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00:15:57.771 --> 00:16:01.825
Because, all these
terrible scenarios I've painted --

00:16:01.849 --> 00:16:03.758
they are not destiny.

00:16:04.171 --> 00:16:05.528
They're optional.

00:16:06.012 --> 00:16:09.619
The danger is still kind of distant.

00:16:10.247 --> 00:16:13.010
And that means it will only befall us

00:16:13.034 --> 00:16:15.222
if we allow it to.

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00:16:15.950 --> 00:16:17.144
Let's not.

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00:16:17.168 --> 00:16:18.884
Thank you very much for listening.

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00:16:18.908 --> 00:16:23.460
(Applause)