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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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

We already talked a bit about the mirror ribosome.

It's the most complex macromolecule that you would need to make to be able to make a mirror cell.

And so it's quite a natural stopping point in a way.

It's also very well defined.

But...

People in the US, people in China, people elsewhere are interested in doing this because they think it might be helpful for manufacturing mirror therapeutics.

And so there's an ongoing conversation at the moment around whether those potential benefits justify the risks of getting closer to mirror life.

We don't really know how far away a mirror ribosome is from a mirror cell.

It could turn out that there are still a lot of steps and things that make it difficult.

But it also could turn out that it's quite easy.

And I think it's going to be really difficult to know that in advance.

It is worth saying the mirror ribosome doesn't pose any risk in and of itself.

It can't self-replicate.

It can't evolve.

It doesn't have these...

special risks that mirror life does have.

So it's all about how much closer it gets us to making mirror life.

In fact, it would be very difficult to go from there to making mirror life.

Then it might make sense for it to happen.

There are also even different types of mirror ribosomes.

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