[munksbeer]

>Speaking practically your hypothetical is a scenario that requires somebody that is proactively interested in, and theoretically capable of, making a e.g. dangerous virus, yet are unwilling/unable to do so without a chatbot. How many people might this possibly apply to? I think the number is literally zero.

I don't disagree with the rest of your post, but this doesn't seem correct.

I think I'd phrase it that there probably already exist, or will exist, people with the inclination to cause global mass death, but don't have the knowledge or ability to manufacture a virus to achieve this.

[somenameforme]

The important part is being theoretically capable of. Fortunately there are massive barriers to doing things like synthesizing deadly viruses, and it's not just a matter of knowledge but of skill. For instance there was a Japanese death cult [1] that at its peak included not only many graduates of top universities in Japan but tens of millions of dollars in funding. But their escapades read a lot like a satire of incompetence.

That's not to say they were harmless - they managed to kill numerous people, but they'd have killed vastly more if they just drove some trucks into crowds as is becoming a typical weapon of terrorists. And I think the main reason is because knowing how something is done, and actually doing that thing, are radically different.

For a goofy analog, think about assembling sofas or even certain desks/chairs from a kit. That can actually be fairly tricky, to the point that there's an industry built around doing it for you. But there it's literally following like a few dozen steps with a carefully manufactured set of goodies and all tools right in front of you. Imagine doing something many orders of magnitude more complex where you're improving everything, have guidance that may be simply wrong, requires not only extreme skill but also a wide variety of difficult to acquire equipment, and if you make any mistake - you stand a decent chance of killing yourself.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo