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

And that means I think we have a really good chance at kind of cutting off this risk.

Obviously, this is skiffing out a lot of nuance, but it could be like living on Earth today without an immune system or even like living on Earth today with an immune system.

But where you could catch Ebola from trees or from your pet cat or from a carrot that you eat or something like that.

So it could be could be really crazy.

More concretely, I'd break it down into two categories.

areas of risk.

One is immunological and the second is ecological.

So myrobacteria could infect not just humans, but a wide range of different species because they have this property of broad immune evasion.

We're used to thinking about something like COVID or influenza that can spread from human to human, but it doesn't also infect plants and insects, livestock, whereas myrobacteria might be able to do that.

And the second area is around the ecological risks.

Myrobacteria could grow and might be able to persist in the environment directly.

So they might be able to grow in soil or in oceans.

And that opens up another transmission route directly from the environment to multicellular hosts.

So you might be able to get infected by myrobacteria from dust blowing into your home that has bacteria on it that you inhale or something like that.

And we don't really have the tools and technologies to deal with a threat like that at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, there might still be parts of the immune system that work.

But there are examples of people that have had immune disorders that essentially replicate what it would be like to not have an immune system.

There was, for example, a guy in the 70s called David Vetter, who was also known as Bubble Boy.

When he was born, he had to be immediately put into a sterile plastic chamber where he lived all 12 years of his life.

All of his food, any of the toys that he used, anything like that, before entering that

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