You are correct, I was mostly interpreting his post to be about a purposefully engineered virus with specific properties. One could throw darts and hope to get "lucky" by recombining and tweaking existing pathogens. That individual would be wrong a lot, but with concerted effort might find something. I'm not sure that is new technology though. This could have been done at least 15 years ago.
One point that I didn't have time to make was that high mortality is not generally evolutionarily advantageous. Even if you cooked up a strain that was especially nasty, it could take considerable effort to prevent it from mutating in the wild into something less so, since the mutated virus would have a survival advantage of not killing its host. Unlike machines, a creator can't really control what happens to a biological system in the wild as it interacts with the environment. In the scenario you describe, there is considerable uncertainty as to whether it would actually spread as engineered.
This is the crux of what I've clearly done a poor job of saying: we know so little that all these scenarios still rely on incredible amounts of luck more than technology.
One point that I didn't have time to make was that high mortality is not generally evolutionarily advantageous. Even if you cooked up a strain that was especially nasty, it could take considerable effort to prevent it from mutating in the wild into something less so, since the mutated virus would have a survival advantage of not killing its host. Unlike machines, a creator can't really control what happens to a biological system in the wild as it interacts with the environment. In the scenario you describe, there is considerable uncertainty as to whether it would actually spread as engineered.
This is the crux of what I've clearly done a poor job of saying: we know so little that all these scenarios still rely on incredible amounts of luck more than technology.
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