So there's about seven and a half billion of us.
The World Health Organization tells us that 300 million of us are depressed,
and about 800,000 people take their lives every year.
A tiny subset of them choose a profoundly nihilistic route,
which is they die in the act of killing as many people as possible.
These are some famous recent examples.
And here's a less famous one. It happened about nine weeks ago.
If you don't remember it,
it's because there's a lot of this going on.
Wikipedia just last year counted 323 mass shootings
in my home country, the United States.
Not all of those shooters were suicidal,
not all of them were maximizing their death tolls,
but many, many were.
An important question becomes, what limits do these people have?
Take the Vegas shooter.
He slaughtered 58 people.
Did he stop there because he'd had enough?
No, and we know this because he shot and injured another 422 people
who he surely would have preferred to kill.
We have no reason to think he would have stopped 4,200.
In fact, with somebody this nihilistic, he may well have gladly killed us all.
We don't know.
What we do know is this:
when suicidal murderers really go all in,
technology is the force multiplier.
Here's an example.
Several years back, there was a rash of 10 mass school attacks in China
carried out with things like knives and hammers and cleavers
because guns are really hard to get there.
By macabre coincidence, this last attack
occurred just hours before the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.
But that one American attack killed roughly the same number of victims
as the 10 Chinese attacks combined.
So we can fairly say, knife terrible, gun way worse,
and airplane massively worse,
as pilot Andreas Lubitz showed when he forced 149 people
to join him in his suicide
smashing a plane into the French Alps.
And there are other examples of this.
And I'm afraid there are far more deadly weapons in our near future than airplanes,
ones not made of meetal.
So let's consider the apocalyptic dynamics
that will ensue
if suicidal mass murder hitches a ride
on a rapidly advancing field
that for the most part holds boundless promise for society.
Somewhere out there in the world, there's a tiny group of people
who would attempt, however ineptly,
to kill us all if they could just figure out how.
The Vegas shooter may or may not have been one of them,
but with seven and a half billion of us,
this is a non-zero population.
There's plenty of suicidal nihilists out there.
We've already seen that.
There's people with severe mood disorders that they can't even control.
There are people who have just suffered deranging traumas, etc. etc.
As for the corollary group,
its size was simply zero forever
until the Cold War,
when suddenly the leaders of two global alliances
attained the ability to blow up the world.
The number of people with actual doomsday buttons
has stayed fairly stable since then,
but I'm afraid it's about to grow,
and not just to three.
This is going off the charts.
I mean, it's going to look like a tech business plan.
(Laughter)
And the reason is,
we're in the era of exponential technologies,
which routinely take eternal impossibilities
and make them the actual superpowers of one or two living geniuses
and -- this is the big part --
then diffuse those powers to more or less everybody.
Now, here's a benign example.
If you wanted to play checkers with a computer in 1952,
you literally had to be that guy,
then commandeer one of the world's 19 copies of that computer,
then used your Nobel-adjacent brain to teach it checkers.
That was the bar.
Today, you just need to know someone who knows someone who owns a telephone,
because computing is an exponential technology.
So is synthetic biology,
which I'll now refer to as synbio,
and in 2011, a couple of researchers did something every bit as ingenious
and unprecedented as the checkers trick
with H5N1 flu.
This is a train that kills up to 60 percent of the people it infects,
more than ebola,
but it is so uncontagious
that it's killed fewer than 50 people since 2015.
So these researchers edited H5N1's genome
and made it every bit as deadly, but also wildly contagious.
The news arm of one of the world's top two scientific journals
said if this thing got out, it would likely cause a pandemic
with perhaps millions of deaths,
and Dr. Paul Keim said
he could not think of an organism as scary as this,
which is the last thing I personally want to hear
from the chairman of the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity.
And by the way, Dr. Keim also said this --
["I don't think anthrax is scary at all compared to this."]
and he's also one of these.
[Anthrax expert] (Laughter)
Now, the good news about the 2011 biohack
is that the people who did it didn't mean us any harm.
They're virologists.
They believe they were advancing science.
The bad news is that technology does not freeze in place,
and over the next few decades,
their feat will become trivially easy.
In fact, it's already way easier, because as we learned yesterday morning,
just two years after they did their work,
the CRISPR system was harnessed for genome editing.
This was a radical breakthrough that makes gene editing massively easier,
so easy that CRISPR is now taught in high schools.
And this stuff is moving quicker than computing.
That slow, stodgy white line up there?
That's Moore's Law.
That shows us how quickly computing is getting cheaper.
That steep, crazy fun green line,
that shows us how quickly genetic sequencing is getting cheaper.
Now, gene editing and synthesis and sequencing,
they're different disciplines, but they're tightly related,
and they're all moving in these headlong rates,
and the keys to the kingdom are these tiny, tiny data files.
That is an excerpt of H5N1's genome.
The whole thing can fit on just a few pages.
And yeah, don't worry, you can Google this as soon as you get home.
It's all over the internet, right?
And the part that made it contagious
could well fit on a single post-it note,
and once a genius
makes a data file,
any idiot can copy it,
distribute it worldwide,
or print it.
And I don't mean print it on this,
but soon enough on this.
So let's imagine a scenario.
Let's say it's 2026, to pick an arbitrary year,
and a brilliant virologist, hoping to advance science
and better understand pandemics,
designs a new bug.
It's as contagious as chicken pox,
it's as deadly as ebola,
and it incubates for months and months before causing an outbreak,
so the whole world can be infected before the first sign of trouble.
Then, her university gets hacked, and of course this is not science fiction.
In fact, just one recent US indictment
documents the hacking of over 300 universities.
So that file with the bug's genome on it
spreads to the internet's dark corners,
and once a file is out there, it never comes back.
Just ask anybody who runs a movie studio or a music label.
So now maybe in 2026,
it would take a true genius like our virologist
to make the actual living critter,
but 15 years later,
it may just take a DNA printer you can find in any high school.
And if not? Give it a couple of decades.
So, a quick aside.
Remember this slide here?
Turn your attention to these two words.
If somebody tries this,
and is only 0.1 percent effective, eight million people die.
That's 2,500 9/11s.