Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics
The world witnessed the severe humanitarian and economic repercussions of pandemic pathogens during COVID-19 crisis, and we remain dangerously unprepared for future pandemics.
With the rate of zoonotic pathogen spread increasing and rapid technological advances in synthetic biology and AI, there exists the possibility of far deadlier pandemics, but also new opportunities to defend against them.
This podcast is from the Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics course, which covers technical and policy efforts to prevent, detect and respond to catastrophic pandemics.
Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics
Differential Technology Development: An Innovation Governance Consideration for Navigating Technology Risks
This paper introduces a framing of "differential technology development" – affecting the relative timing of new innovations to reduce a specific risk. For instance, it may be beneficial to delay or halt risk-increasing technologies and preferentially advance risk-reducing defensive, safety, or substitute technologies. As you read, consider how you might apply this framing to biosecurity risks associated with developments in AI and biotechnology (this week's pre-class exercise).
Original text: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b481e9ad-bc27-4550-87ca-f414354aeb35
Author(s): Jonas B. Sandbrink, Hamish Hobbs, Jacob L. Swett, Allan Dafoe, Anders Sandberg