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

So in February, there was a meeting that was the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Asilomar Conference on recombinant DNA, where they first kind of proposed a moratorium on recombinant DNA.

Out of that, a statement signed by nearly 100 people from all over the world, including China, the US, Europe, I think actually someone from every inhabited continent,

signed on said that they thought mirror life should not be created if these risks are as bad as they seem the uk government has looked into this a german biological safety committee has looked into this issue and reaffirmed the key assessments and unesco has an international bioethics committee which has recently put out a report recommending a precautionary global moratorium on making mirror cells so yeah so i think there's been a lot of progress around

Let's not do the final step of making mirror life.

And the big open questions are now kind of where should we stop on the way?

And that's something that we're working on a lot in BDF.

One of the amazing things about working on Mirror Life is the number of different disciplines that it touches.

So over the weekend preparing for this interview, I was brushing up on ecology, synthetic biology, immunology, policy, AI, human cloning.

There are just so many different things that can be brought to bear on this.

So I can't tell you one specific person that I think is needed here.

There's actually a whole range of expertise that could be relevant.

And

Different expertise is going to be needed at different times and for different things as we go forward.

There's definitely a need for more scientists to be thinking about some of the open questions here.

And there's definitely a need for people with expertise in policy to start thinking about how we're going to move forward.

I think at the moment, the marginal impact of an extra person working on mirror life is huge.

If you're listening in a lot of countries, you could probably become the expert in policy around mirror life in your country within a few weeks or months of working on this.

So I think...

I'm very happy that lots of people are working on AI safety and certainly think many people should choose that.

But I would encourage people to think about what could they uniquely offer to this problem.

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