Rob Reid: How synthetic biology could wipe out humanity -- and how we can stop it
Rob Reid is a humor author and the founder of the company that created the music subscription service Rhapsody. Full bio
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seven and a half billion of us.
that 300 million of us are depressed,
take their lives every year.
a profoundly nihilistic route,
as many people as possible.
It happened about nine weeks ago.
a lot of this going on.
counted 323 mass shootings
their death tolls,
What limits do these people have?
he shot and injured another 422 people
preferred to kill.
he would have stopped at 4,200.
he may well have gladly killed us all.
of 10 mass school attacks in China
like knives and hammers and cleavers,
this last attack occurred
in Newtown, Connecticut.
roughly the same number of victims
knife: terrible; gun: way worse.
when he forced 149 people
weapons in our near future than airplanes,
dynamics that will ensue
on a rapidly advancing field
boundless promise for society.
there's a tiny group of people
could just figure out how.
have been one of them,
nihilists out there.
that they can't even control.
deranging traumas, etc. etc.
until the Cold War,
of two global alliances
with actual doomsday buttons
like a tech business plan.
of exponential technologies,
eternal impossibilities
of one or two living geniuses
to more or less everybody.
with a computer in 1952,
19 copies of that computer,
to teach it checkers.
who knows someone who owns a telephone,
is an exponential technology.
did something every bit as ingenious
up to 60 percent of the people it infects,
than 50 people since 2015.
but also wildly contagious.
top two scientific journals
it would likely cause a pandemic
as scary as this,
I personally want to hear
Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity.
is scary at all compared to this."]
didn't mean us any harm.
does not freeze in place,
because as we learned yesterday morning,
for genome editing.
massively easier --
is now taught in high schools.
quicker than computing.
computing is getting cheaper.
genetic sequencing is getting cheaper.
and synthesis and sequencing,
but they're tightly related.
in these headlong rates.
are these tiny, tiny data files.
on just a few pages.
as soon as you get home.
to pick an arbitrary year,
hoping to advance science
before causing an outbreak,
before the first sign of trouble.
this is not science fiction.
of over 300 universities.
spreads to the internet's dark corners.
it never comes back --
a movie studio or a music label.
like our virologist
you can find at any high school.
and is only 0.1 percent effective,
to be concerned about anybody
handful of geniuses
and maybe even a little bit more.
and so not part of this group.
barely OK-ish with that.
grad students are enabled?
going to be perfectly stable?
premed is fully enabled?
hundreds of thousands of people
who dressed up like the Joker
at a Batman premiere.
if we start focusing on it now.
countless hours
for science podcasts I create.
I haven't gotten that out there yet --
to revere its potential.
heal our environment
of other creatures.
you know, annihilating ourselves?
synbio is here,
the wheel to bad actors.
on bioweapons treaties
illegal drug lab in the world.
bioengineers we have,
are going to be on our side.
would be on our side in this one.
is just so low.
advantages do matter,
can inflict grievous harm,
the hell out of this:
to prepare and prevent.
and there will be somebody --
that spans society,
a tiny group of experts
and exploiting synthetic biology,
with the financial system,
massively corrupted
how they could cut corners,
on the rest of us
with the $22 trillion bill.
the thank-you letters?
too busy to be grateful.
as a huge issue,
to safeguard our prosperity,
for the whole damn ecosystem?
be given on this first critical layer.
of many great ideas that are out there.
pathogen sensors that we currently have
price performance curve
as smoke detectors and even smartphones.
and distribution,
to new threats or mutations.
and maybe even our homes.
and medicines is within reach
suicidal mass murder
treatment-resistant depression or PTSD.
like Rick Doblin working on this,
who are way more numerous
suffering will soon endanger all of us,
join us and Al Capone
can be and should be a white blood cell
can be despicable, yes,
broken and sad people,
need to do what we can
fighting these dangers
of synthetic biology.
that at least claim
spend 20 percent of their time
to building defenses for the common good?
go to some very, very dark places,
take you there this evening.
and respected the danger,
when it's incredibly productive
to fight this danger.
terrible scenarios I've painted --
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Rob Reid - Author, entrepreneurRob Reid is a humor author and the founder of the company that created the music subscription service Rhapsody.
Why you should listen
Rob Reid is an author and a serial entrepreneur. He founded the company that created the Rhapsody music website, and his latest book, Year Zero, was published in July 2013. In it, aliens seek to erase the ruinous fines on their vast collections of pirated American music by destroying the Earth. Parts of it are made up. The audiobook version will be read by John Hodgman.
On the TED Blog, read more on the numbers behind Copyright Math >>
Rob Reid | Speaker | TED.com