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

There's only a really small group thinking about this at the moment who are not going to be expert in all the things necessary.

So this is one of the areas where we really need more people to come in and think about how this should go.

Yeah, we have actually.

There are some really good examples here.

Nice.

One is the Environmental Modification Treaty, which I didn't know about until quite recently.

But basically, this is a treaty that quite a lot of different countries signed on to in the late 80s, prohibiting the use of environmental modification as a weapon.

So that means like using weather as a weapon.

And the US and the USSR both signed on to this and kind of collaborated on it.

It's a super interesting one that I'd love to know a bit more about the history, but it is an example of a technology that didn't exist

being prohibited well in advance.

So I think this is one example.

Other areas include the Montreal Protocol, which is one of the most successful examples of an international treaty prohibiting ozone-depleting substances.

There's also a really not well-known treaty prohibiting the use of blinding weapons like lasers.

things like this have been agreed to before.

So I think there is actually quite a lot of precedent showing that we can identify something that doesn't yet exist and decide not to pursue it.

Yeah, so human cloning, no one has done.

In 1996, Dolly the sheep was cloned.

And then there was this big discussion that ultimately resulted in people agreeing that human cloning shouldn't be done.

That's an interesting example where the technology is kind of in principle there to do this, but no one has actually gone ahead and done it.

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