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 was even something we might be able to realistically do in 10 years.

I hadn't been tracking a lot of the developments going on in the synthetic biology field and learning about them.

I was like, whoa, this is way further along than I would have guessed.

It was quite hard work.

It was a really busy time, but it was also amazing to get to work with such great people and people who fundamentally cared about what we were doing.

These are people who previously, in a lot of cases, wanted to make Mirror Life, and now we're coming forward and saying this is something that shouldn't be done.

So although there were a lot of hours, there were a lot of phone calls with many different people from all around the world,

it was really motivating to be a part of that group and to know that the way we talked about this was going to make a really big difference to how the issue went.

So I was also pretty nervous because we had to make some decisions when we were writing up the paper about what recommendations we'd make.

This, for many people, was kind of coming out of nowhere.

And there's a different world where it could have been perceived as this crazy sci-fi risk and not taken seriously.

And it was really important to avoid that from happening.

So when the paper finally went up, we were kind of holding our breath to see how it would go.

And I think, fortunately, it seems to have played out pretty well since then.

Yeah, I mean, we thought a lot about this and there's a section in the technical report at the front, which I think does a really nice job of summarizing the top line thinking.

But the main argument that I find most compelling is that by default, we were on track to make Mirror Life eventually.

So a lot of well-meaning researchers had said this is something they wanted to do.

It had been this kind of

long-term goal of synthetic biology this interesting thing to aim towards for quite a long time and so by publishing the paper and drawing attention to the risks i think we were letting the conversation about what should be done happen much earlier than it otherwise might have

By default, people would have continued developing technologies relevant to mirror life, and then either we'd have just developed mirror life, which could have been really bad, or people would have spotted the risks nearer to that time, and then we'd have less time to deal with them.

Showing 841–860 of 922 · page 43 of 47