James Smith

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922 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 13 Jan

James Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #233 – James Smith on how to prevent a mirror life catastrophe · 13 Jan 2026 podcast

it's very likely that some animal immune systems will just happen to work against this.

Having said that, I still think it's plausible that a large fraction of animals could be susceptible here.

There are even some vertebrates like the lampreys and hagfish, which if you've never seen a picture of them, they look really like the sandworm from June.

They have slightly different immune systems, which we haven't looked into in as much detail, but share the same principles.

that's vertebrates, then invertebrates, so things like insects, the immune systems are less well characterized.

So insect immune systems are less well understood than vertebrate ones, but we do know that insects have innate immunity that's quite similar to what we have in vertebrates.

They lack an adaptive immune system, but they do have innate immune systems that similarly rely on pattern recognition receptors

to get them to work.

So in fruit flies that are one of the most well-studied examples, their antibacterial defenses being activated is downstream of binding of a pattern recognition receptor to a molecule called peptidoglycan, which is a chiral molecule that's present in bacterial cell walls.

And there have been experiments where these fruit flies have that receptor knocked out so it doesn't work.

And that really increases the susceptibility of the fruit flies to infection by bacteria.

So common bacteria that don't normally cause disease will end up killing them.

And this is also true in mosquitoes and bees.

Beyond that, I'm not so sure.

There's a lot of this that hasn't been studied in detail, but the same principles of immunity are common to all animals.

And so I think we should unfortunately be quite worried.

I'm somewhat confident that there'll be at least something that would be able to respond to this.

But in the animals that we've studied the best, humans, we, I think, do know enough to be quite worried.

Even in humans, there's definitely a possibility that we're missing something in the analysis.

And in fact, the immune system can deal with it from some unpredictable way.

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