I remember (sorry can't give a proper quote) a biologist interviews about the fear of lab grown "super" seeds escaping the lab. They chuckled basically saying that nature is a very VERY challenging place. There are plenty of ecological niches but they are well guarded by incumbents.

Sure some new hacks will take place, including on poorly guarded infrastructure and yes it will have some very unfortunate consequences... but also infrastructure is precisely designed to be resilient. There is quite a bit of failsafe, redundancy, etc built in which is precisely why those projects are typically slow and expensive, unlike a random website for a restaurant.

TL;DR: nope, some isolated incidents will happen but without chain reactions.

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karmelapple 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

Biologists take ethics much more seriously than any computer engineer or computer scientist that I've seen.

I saw a very notable scientist talk about topics like this and how they wrestle with them. Things like a "gene drive" [0] are being experimented with in the world [1], and biologists think very hard before doing certain things with the powers they wield. And I have not heard a life scientist laugh off ethical or spreading concerns when a thoughtful question was asked... but maybe the interview you're thinking of was a more lighthearted one?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-gene-d...

	▲	utopiah 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My point isn't so much about the work ethics of one or another but rather than systems, even interconnected ones, are rarely as genuinely interdependent as science fiction drama lead us to believe. Yes there can be terrible catastrophes e.g Fukushima, but what actually happened, within which extremely rare conditions, versus what we freely imagined is quite different. We might need more reminders of those risks to properly insure such systems don't lead to the collapse of one to another (sadly) but still we manage to learn from it.