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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

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venomsnake

Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them.

Now this tech in some crazy hands is dangerous.

But with the power amplification in modern times -

Two generations ago - a person could create a small business or small terrorist act alone.

10 years ago it was possible to have a thousand person billion dollar company and 9/11 ...

Now we have a billion dollar company with single digit numbers of employees and we will have the first billion dollar one man company in the next 5-10 years.

I leave the rest to your imagination. But you should not be worried from terrorist organisations - disgruntled lone wolves will be the real danger.

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Something that keeps me up at night is the idea of someone a bit more amoral than usual getting enough experience with gene driver technology, and using it to push genetic modifications quickly through the human species.

Don't like someone with $genetic_trait? Tune your virus to target a specific piece of DNA, and then have it remove genetic segments responsible for life critical functions (a la CRISPR CAS9).

https://www.neb.com/tools-and-resources/feature-articles/cri...

It's a worry that's been around for a while:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague

http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Moral%20Virologist

(and probably plenty of others I'm forgetting)

>Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them.

I highly suggest you look up the Zetas cartel and their methodologies.

I'd argue that they are killing their competitors not customers

Sure but the original argument was that the drug cartels have a tremendous potential for violence. That seems established and the "customer" part's a red haring.

And how many american consumers have been killed by the Zetas?

I think it's a little more complicated than that. Would selling nuclear weapons to african despots kill the customers of of a mexican drug cartel?

That said - I agree that lone wolves may be a much worse problem, especially in the long run. For now, there is something to be said for having billions of dollars of drug money to spend on R&D...

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