Dr. Richard Moulange

speaker

1,784 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 31 Mar

Dr. Richard Moulange’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong? · 31 Mar 2026 podcast

So long before AI came along, biological weapons have in fact been a viable weapon of mass destruction.

And I don't think we should hide from that.

But then you also mentioned terrorists and you're absolutely right.

So people have been saying, what if terrorists can do this sort of amazing thing?

Thankfully, it seems that

Up to this point, terrorists have both not been very good at doing certain things.

So most notably, I think we can look to Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult, especially active in the late 1990s and earlier, and also Al-Qaeda in the early 2000s.

Both attempted...

to have biological weapons programs, but generally not of the transmissible kind.

So already that suggests that there was some sort of resource expertise barrier, but also they happily made stupid mistakes where they used the vaccine strain of a virus instead of, or the vaccine strain of a particular pathogen instead of the virulent one, which is great.

However, some of those mistakes that are on the public record are the sorts of things that an AI could definitely help you with today.

And so this is where I know it's difficult.

We do not always have as much empirical evidence as we might like.

But that's because we don't want empirical evidence because empirical evidence means there's been an event.

And the closest kind of empirical evidence that we could gather is classified because there will be data on whether there have been more or fewer attempts by non-state actors.

But if, and I hope there haven't been, but if there have been, they have been foiled because we did not see it in the real world.

But there are very few actors, and they are inside governments, who actually know about that.

That said, and I draw attention to this is public information, Dr. Jeff Alstotz, who's formerly of RAND, another expert on AI and cybersecurity, gave evidence to a Senate committee.

I think it was the Intelligence Committee.

I'm not quite sure.

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