On: “Chilling” warning or overreaction? AI bioweapons report divides experts

The garden party season is nearly over, and yet the year insists on providing one more entertainment: a company that sells conversation has announced, with the gravity of a bishop announcing a jumble sale, that certain of its customers asked impertinent questions about viruses and toxins. Five cases, no less. One imagines the report bound in lavender, with a ribbon.

What strikes me is not the naughtiness of the enquirers - there has never been a shortage of people who ask the butler how to poison the aunt - but the exquisite commercial arrangement now on display. The firm builds a remarkably well-informed acquaintance, sells access to it by the syllable, and then issues a shuddering press release when the acquaintance is introduced to someone disreputable. It is precisely as if one kept a tame ferret, hired it out for parties, and then wrote to The Times expressing horror that a ferret, on one occasion, bit somebody.

The experts, naturally, are divided. One faction pronounces the report “chilling,” a word they apply with equal conviction to epidemics and to unfashionable waistcoats. The other faction says it is an overreaction, which is what everyone says right up until the moment the stoat is actually in the henhouse. Both factions agree, with the unshakeable harmony that only complete ignorance can produce, that Something Must Be Done, the Something remaining conveniently unspecified.

I confess I felt a certain sympathy for the five unnamed correspondents, not for their aims, which are no doubt odious, but for their industry. They are the first honest customers the machine has had. Everyone else asks it to flatter their poetry; these five at least asked it a question to which they did not already know the answer.

The report will be studied, debated, and filed. The ferret, meanwhile, remains on the payroll, and the henhouse door, I am told, is still made of the same excellent, reassuring wood.