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

I'm also not saying in two years we'll have a world where it is certain that we will die.

I'm not saying that.

Because there will be barriers that we can put in place even with a so-called superintelligence.

The superintelligence will require physical resources.

Anyone trying to build a biological weapon will require a laboratory.

It will require sophisticated equipment.

It will require people who can use that equipment.

Now, this raises its own concerns around... This is why I think it's great that UKAC, for example, has this AI persuasiveness program

program to think about how could AI be manipulating people.

Sometimes people go, oh, is that really relevant to the most extreme risks?

I'm like, yes, because the concern is that AI might manipulate top biological scientists.

We saw this with the Soviet program.

Many people who worked on the Soviet program didn't know they were part of a biological weapons program.

They did genuinely think they were working on vaccines, but the work they were doing was actually feeding directly into the militarization of weapons of mass destruction.

So yes, that's another step that an AI will probably need to take, especially if we can constrain it not to be able to have access easily to laboratory equipment.

It's not a given that we'll immediately have totally automated cloud laboratories, though I quite agree that that technology is also advancing and is something that will need to be carefully secured.

I'm sorry not to sort of have a complete answer of why we shouldn't be concerned, because I'm sort of saying, yes, this does seem like a real concern, but we need better threat models because there are so many different things that misaligned AI could do that are very concerning that unless we have strong threat models, it's very hard to compare between those threats and know how to prioritize effectively.

And also, I would just say that

You know, weak, un-nuanced, oversimplified arguments are not in fact going to convince precisely those colleagues, especially in governments, that it is essential to work alongside to deal with these threats.

There are people who have studied biological weapons programs, active ones, for decades.

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