Cross-posted from my SecureBio Notebook.

This is a lightly-edited version of a memo that I presented at the Summer 2026 Biosecurity Summit outside of DC. While others at SecureBio often see things similarly, I'm attempting to present my view and not a SecureBio "house view".

The Goal

We need to be robust to adversaries who want to cause very large-scale harm with biology. This includes actors (human or AI) who want to kill all humans, cause short-term incapacitation or long-term civilizational collapse, or who have strategies for sparing some while they harm others. There are multiple reasons an actor might have these targets aside from being directly omnicidal, such as reducing response capacity during an AI takeover.

In It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, Adin Richards discusses the possibility of improvising defenses against an environmental threat such as mirror bacteria. He gives an exploratory overview of why it might be possible to apply materials and equipment people often already have in their houses to pressurize all or part of a house with filtered air. It would be great if this were possible, but with all the ways for an improvised system to fail I'm pretty skeptical.

I decided to try a simpler version, testing how much I could positively pressurize a single room with a relatively powerful HEPA air purifier (AirFanta 3Pro. This is close to a best case, since most people won't have something as good as an AirFanta.

I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up.

After staying off Twitter reasonably successfully for years, I cross-posted my AI Tweets there a few weeks ago. I had something very Twitter-shaped to say, and I thought it was important to get out, so I do think this was worth it. And it all went well: none of this is complaining about the comments I got there.

Coming back a few times to check notifications, however, it's been very good at baiting me: Tweets that are confidently wrong in cases where I have relevant and uncommon knowledge. The pull to dive in and share what I know is very strong! Then this bleeds over to the far broader case where people are wrong, and you have a large potential time sink.

If it were just the time sink, I'd stop resisting. I spend some time on HN and Reddit, and to the extent that Twitter could substitute for that by showing me things I was more interested in, that wouldn't be an issue. The real problem is the culture.

When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, and why other people expect slower changes, I think a big component is disagreement on the extent to which AI will affect non-computer work. Sure, programming has sped up massively with Claude Code etc, and models like Astra seem posed to make similar changes to work with spreadsheets and other common business tools, but what about work that doesn't include computers at all?

The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do. Leaning into the way the world has become very scifi, we could call this "teleoperating" people. Many things that are hard for robots are very easy for people, there are strong economic reasons that push towards teleoperation, and this bypasses many legal and social limitations on what AI can do. We should expect this to lead to large and rapid changes in the physical world.

We should end net metering, including for existing solar installations, and compensate people with a one-time subsidy for battery purchase. I'm going to give an argument from grid efficiency, which I expect to be the main consideration for most people, though the benefit that makes me enthusiastic about this change is actually increasing societal resilience.

Net metering is a common form of solar subsidy where you only pay for your "net" usage: the difference between how much you consume and how much you produce. At first glance this doesn't even seem like a subsidy: if you take 800 kWh and put back 800 kWh, then did you really use any? But it's not like a bank account: the kWh you put back are usually much less useful than the kWh you used.

Say I started a solar farm, putting out a lot of panels somewhere out in the less populated part of the state (MA), and sold the power to the grid. Averaging over the year, the electricity market might pay me $0.05/kWh. On the other hand, when the panels on my house send power back to the grid I get $0.32/kWh. [1] There are several factors that pull these apart, but I think the most illuminating one is how the value of electricity varies over time.

The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I'd love to see more of this "all things considered" thinking around bans.

In fact, one specific place where I'd like to see this thinking applied is adjacent to this rule: babywearing carriers on planes. When our babies were little, carriers were massively helpful in flying. The baby likes it, and your arms are free. But for takeoff and landing, the FAA requires you to take your baby out of the carrier and hold them in your arms.