The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

(For a rough sense of how much it would cost rogue actors to build nuclear weapons, consider the example of North Korea, a pariah state denied most access to outside assistance. The South Korean government estimates that the North’s nuclear weapons program cost between $1.1 billion and $3.2 billion in 2016, the year it successfully developed nuclear-armed missiles.)[39] By contrast, biological weapons can be very cheap. According to a 1996 NATO report, such weapons could be developed for $100,000 (around $190,000 in 2023 money) by a team of just five biologists in the space of a few weeks, without any exotic equipment.[40] When it comes to impact, a 1969 expert panel reported to the United Nations that biological weapons were about eight hundred times as cost-effective as nuclear weapons at targeting civilians—and biotech advances in the five decades since have almost surely increased that ratio significantly.[41]