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

The thing that you're thinking of is human germline editing, which is a different technology.

What that demonstrates to me is that

a norm on its own that lets you go right up to the edge of being able to do something is not sufficient because you can't assume that people are always going to go along with a regulation or with a norm and so that means you need to draw lines earlier on that mean that if people cross those lines there's still space between where they are and the thing that you're worried about bad thing okay that makes a lot of sense thank you

Yeah, I think there are.

So you can use conjugate vaccines to kind of trick the body into having a robust response against basically anything.

So you can use them to trick the body into making antibodies against cocaine.

You could do the same potentially for mirror components.

And that's something that I think is worth exploring in some more detail.

More generally,

physical countermeasures should be helpful against mirror bacteria.

So as a kind of plan B backup, if prevention doesn't work, I do think investing in robust biodefense that's kind of threat agnostic could be very valuable and is something that people should think about doing.

That might be the extreme.

But in the nearer term, things like PPE, biohardening, and possibly early warning systems, some of the things that Andrew Snyder-Beattie talked about on a recent podcast on 80,000 hours, I think many of those could help for a myelobacteria outbreak too.

That's a really good question.

A lot of the methods that we use to detect things use enzymes that wouldn't work for mirror life.

Because of the chirality of them.

Classic.

So PCR is an example here, which is used to kind of amplify DNA.

We can actually already make all of the enzymes in DNA.

PCR in the mirror form.

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