Dr. Richard Moulange

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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

It's a bit further out there, but I think it's well within the decade to be worrying about.

The other kind of concern is sometimes people think that it's sort of a ruse by the governance community.

And they go, oh, well, you know, chemical and biological weapons are a well-established type of weapons of mass destruction.

It's a well-known national security domain.

So clearly everyone's talking about this just to get governments on side to sort of speak their language.

But it's not really what we're concerned about.

I'm really concerned about it, guys.

I'm not making it up.

It is true that it is sort of helpful in a macabre way that it is a sort of well-known threat that you can use as a way to sort of talk to government and industry folk and get across concerns.

But that's because biology, it's a well-known weapons of mass destruction, right?

There's a reason that the AI statement a few years ago was saying we think AI safety should be as important as pandemics and nuclear war.

Well, they picked pandemics and nuclear war because those are well-known, possibly existential risks and certainly extreme risks.

And so when someone thinks this is all some sort of fourth order, 40 chess kind of thing, really it's not.

I think there are three ways.

The most straightforward way is...

Biology is a type of weapon of mass destruction, and AI systems could use it to wipe out some or all of humanity.

They could use it to kill many, many people.

In some sense, this is a sort of mundane concern, because of course AI might try and think to do that eventually, because we know that humans have thought about it too.

We worry about people having nuclear weapons and the ability to destroy cities or the world.

Biology is especially concerning because unlike nuclear weapons, where often a lot of infrastructure is required, very expensive resources, in particular, highly enriched uranium or plutonium needs to be gathered.

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