> 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.

This salad my immediate thought as well… a simple lack of creative thinking and a boat load of assumptions.

I’m growing nervous that most of the “nothing crazy is going to happen” arguments I’ve seen appear (to me) to exhibit this kind of hubris.

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