James Smith

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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

And that's so that your immune system doesn't attack itself.

Yeah, a lot of common diseases are the result of the immune system being...

going wrong and actually attacking you, like autoimmune diseases.

So there's a lot of regulation and a lot of redundancy in the immune system.

And that means that often you need more than one signal to get things started.

And we know that many of the signals are not likely to work.

When I speak to my immunologist colleagues about this, they said when they first heard about this issue, their initial reaction is to kind of defend the immune system because the immune system is amazing.

It can do so many things and it is really adaptive, but it also is very complex and breaking one part of it we know can cause really big problems.

So we can't be 100% sure about anything that will happen here, but the fact that we can be pretty confident that certain key parts of the immune system won't work

I think is quite worrying.

I mean, a lot of antibiotics are chiral and so they wouldn't work, but some are achiral and some come in racemic mixtures, which include both chiralities.

And so those would be expected to work.

I think the key difficulty with any medical countermeasure is scaling it up and distributing it to all of the people that would need it.

And even more than that, giving it to all the animals and plants that could be

infected and you'd need different countermeasures most likely for each of the different species that could be infected.

So this would be doing something at a scale that we really can't do at the moment and historically haven't been able to do.

I think it's possible.

I mean, I do think this is something people should be thinking about and should be working on, particularly if you care about reducing X risks specifically, or you care about long-termism.

I think there's quite a good argument to think that by investing in countermeasures, you can cut off some of the worst risks from mirror bacteria.

I'm just not that optimistic that society will be able to get itself together to do this at a massive scale, given our track record.

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