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

Yeah, that sounds about right.

There's a lot of nuance here that we're going to unpack for sure.

But I think this is a reasonable analogy.

And we know from a lot of people who have defects in just one major pathway of immunity that they're similarly really susceptible to bacterial infections.

So even if one or even many parts of the immune system do work, that's not enough to be confident that you're going to be protected from an infection.

Yeah, I mean, historically, I think the main reason people wanted to do this was because it would be a really cool technical project.

And I think there is something aesthetically very pleasing about creating this mirror of life on Earth that I completely buy into.

And

But I don't think it's sufficient justification when there are these risks.

People didn't know about these risks until quite recently.

So now I don't think any well-meaning scientist is going to go ahead and build mirror life.

And in fact, all the people who previously said they wanted to make mirror life have been part of this discussion and are calling for mirror life to not be made.

So what I'm most concerned about now is malicious actors that might in the long term want to make this to cause a huge amount of harm.

Also, the possibility that AI could do this.

This is something that's been recognized in a fair amount of AI commentary now.

AI 2027, they talk about neurobacteria in the slowdown scenario.

Will McCaskill talks about this in his preparing for an intelligence explosion.

And a bunch of other senior AI scientists have been referencing this work.

So that's something that I think needs more thought.

It's also possible that someone might develop mirror bacteria for industrial applications.

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