> Are you in favor of government regulation for people researching new designs for nuclear bombs?
The cases are not particularly similar. It doesn't matter that we have crippled nuclear weapons R&D with regulation. It will matter a great deal if we similarly cripple biotech R&D.
> it seems like an engineered virus has a better chance of killing off everyone (as opposed to not everyone, which is an extremely important distinction in my view; I'm playing for team humanity)
I am not at all as optimistic as you are about that. It is the way of extinction that what kills the last individual may have nothing to do with the underlying factors that doomed the species. The last passenger pigeon died of old age. In my view, far more likely than a single super-disaster that kills everyone at the same time is a sequence of events where one factor delays progress enough to make us vulnerable to another that kills enough people or causes enough disruption to crash civilization, at which point we can't reboot because all the easily accessible fossil fuel deposits are long gone and there's no way to jump directly from wood-burning stoves to solar panels, leaving the survivors to struggle along until ordinary geological processes finish us off. That's the kind of scenario I'm concerned about.
It's definitely plausible that you are right and that deregulating biotech research is the way to minimize existential risk.
I'm not sure I've seen any statement from the Future of Humanity Institute on this issue, except for this blog post by research associate Robin Hanson which would appear to support your point of view:
The cases are not particularly similar. It doesn't matter that we have crippled nuclear weapons R&D with regulation. It will matter a great deal if we similarly cripple biotech R&D.
> it seems like an engineered virus has a better chance of killing off everyone (as opposed to not everyone, which is an extremely important distinction in my view; I'm playing for team humanity)
I am not at all as optimistic as you are about that. It is the way of extinction that what kills the last individual may have nothing to do with the underlying factors that doomed the species. The last passenger pigeon died of old age. In my view, far more likely than a single super-disaster that kills everyone at the same time is a sequence of events where one factor delays progress enough to make us vulnerable to another that kills enough people or causes enough disruption to crash civilization, at which point we can't reboot because all the easily accessible fossil fuel deposits are long gone and there's no way to jump directly from wood-burning stoves to solar panels, leaving the survivors to struggle along until ordinary geological processes finish us off. That's the kind of scenario I'm concerned about.