James Smith

speaker

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 is really cool.

I'm extremely sympathetic.

And I think it makes complete sense that people wanted to do this.

But the amazing thing is that the people who did want to do this are on the paper who come forward and said that it's not something they think should be done.

So the people who were most interested in doing this stuff are now the ones that are saying that it shouldn't be done.

And I think that's just a pretty amazing story.

Yeah, I mean, so unless new evidence comes out that really changes this picture, I think three things would need to be true in the next, say, two to five years for me to feel comfortable that the mirror life problem was basically solved.

The first is that I think there needs to be a strong norm against the work to make mirror life in the scientific community.

The second is that I think there needs to be regulation of enabling technologies or precursor technologies, the things that we develop on the way to making mirror life.

And then the third is that governments need to be taking this seriously such that they would deploy the kinds of capabilities that they use to stop terrorists from accessing nuclear weapons to the question of mirror life.

Yeah, I think on the norm against mirror life, there's already been quite good progress.

So UNESCO, for example, have recently put out a report from their International Bioethics Committee recommending a global moratorium on mirror cells.

The UK government has looked into this and

written up some notes saying that they think mirror life creation should be prevented.

This German expert committee has looked into it and kind of endorsed the analysis of the risks.

So I think there's already quite good momentum on that point.

The second point, which is around the enabling technologies, that I think is a much more difficult

decision um and the reason is because some of those technologies are things that people might want to work on in the near term so you mentioned mirror enzymes but actually people can already make quite a lot of mirror enzymes and most of that i think is is completely fine yeah there's there's no reason to need to go back and try to do anything about work that's that's already been done

But there are things that could be done in, say, the next six months or the next couple of years that some people think should not be pursued.

One example there is the mirror ribosome.

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