Native americans had like a 95% population mortality rate from infectious diseases in the first generation of European settlement, no? Measles, smallpox, flu, etc.

The mortality rate from those diseases was higher than today because the population had no immunity at all, leading to both higher transmission rates and higher mortality rates. This would be true of an engineered virus as well.

And it wasn't just the one virus, it was an entire continent's infectious disease arsenal landing in overlapping waves. Again, something you'd do if you were trying to maximize damage.

So I don't find the bulk of the article about it being impossible for a virus to have this effect all that compelling.

This number gets cited a lot but it's actually the excess mortality of post-European contact, and it's not content wide, it's specific to Mexico. It also includes climate change, famine, war, relocation, etc.

We might even get to relive history the way things are going…

> So I don't find the bulk of the article about it being impossible for a virus to have this effect all that compelling.

I think the other flaw the article has it that it assumes the bad actor is doing targeted design. That they or the AI has some specific virus in mind meeting a set of predefined criteria and they are fighting the biology to hit that predefined target.

But what if the AI-enabled bad actor is a true chaos agent and has no defined goal and they are using tooling that AI helped them construct to perform genetic reassortment pretty much at random to see what happens?

Most of what they create won't really do anything. But some of it will. And there's a low but non-zero probability of Something Really, Really Bad.