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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

It could help a bit, but you're still in a pretty bad situation there because you have myrobacteria in the environment.

Pretty much impossible to get rid of them completely.

And so you have this transmission route from the environment to multicellular species.

I do think it's important to do things now.

And I think that comes from the fact that there's kind of an asymmetry here where we can pause on work towards making mirror life.

And if we learn more, we can always unpause and continue to do that work.

if we've already done the enabling work to making mirror life and we learn that it is in fact really dangerous, we can't undo that work.

That knowledge is already out there.

And so I think it's much more prudent to take action now and then undo it if we learn something else.

But I also think

There is, in fact, a lot of evidence already that this is a problem.

The technical report, which is this 200-page document that many of the top scientists contributed to, goes through all of the evidence that's available.

Now, most of it wasn't generated specifically trying to assess the risks of mirror life, but it was done, and we can use that evidence to think about the risks.

So there are more experiments that could be done, but there's actually a lot of literature already that we're drawing on to come to these conclusions.

One thing I want to say upfront, though, is that because with myrobacteria, we're not just talking about a single species, we're talking about a whole class of organisms that could include many different species, kind of like all viruses or something.

It's very difficult to do experiments that would let us rule out the risk.

We can do experiments that would help us to learn more, might be helpful for thinking through countermeasures and things like that.

But I'm not optimistic that in the near term,

there's a small number of experiments that we could do that would shift the risk-benefit balance into the other direction.

Yeah, I mean, I think now no one, no well-meaning scientist wants to do this, but there were reasons that people wanted to do it before.

Showing 761–780 of 922 · page 39 of 47