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

I think that has broadly been borne out.

And yeah, I think I'd be excited to talk more about safety frameworks and novices here.

So one is that...

Let's take a state like North Korea, again, going on public information.

The US Department of State assesses what North Korea can and can't do.

And at least how they talk about it publicly, North Korea cannot do everything that the most sophisticated bioweapon ears might wish to.

And this is really, really good.

At least that's what the Department of State says publicly.

But over the last few years, if you compare those annual reports,

The paragraph on North Korea has been getting longer.

They have been adding in things, they say, that North Korea could do that wasn't the case a few years ago, or at least admitting them publicly.

But that shows that that sort of mid-tier state, sometimes often also considered a rogue state, is not at the ceiling of even known capabilities.

And we should really, really be concerned about them getting there to the level of richer states that have explored this sort of weaponry longer.

That's one thing.

But then you also asked about sort of ceiling of harm.

Should we be worried about going worse than ever we thought?

Yes, in both counts.

We have not yet seen what a highly optimized influenza or pox virus might look like that is deliberately engineered to better overcome human immunity.

We have good reason to think that the existing viruses that are transmitted around the world and that float around often in other animals, not humans, are not the worst they could ever be.

I must disagree strongly when people say nature is the world's worst bioterrorist.

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