James Smith

I think if you're a biologist, biochemist, something like that, there's a lot that you can do on Mirror Life.

We've got an expression of interest up on our website.

If you're interested, please do go there and check it out.

I also think if you're a researcher or a scientist who is interested in contributing to this, there are a lot of open questions that you could help with and would really encourage you to reach out.

People in the Mirabology Dialogues Fund team have been thinking a lot about the types of research questions that would be great to have extra people working on.

And we'd love to help people get set up there.

If you're a funder, I think there's a massive opportunity here for very cost-effective funding and would love to hear from people that are interested in donating.

More generally, if you're thinking that these risks sound compelling but are not sure how to slot in, I think building generally robust biodefenses that would work against a range of threats is another thing that could be valuable to do.

Yeah, for sure.

I think in a way this is an example or could be an example of one of Bostrom's black balls.

It's like a technology that we could draw from the urn that could be really bad.

I think I'm an optimist in general about technological development.

I've worked in biotech, I've worked on vaccine development, and I think it's really important that we push ahead as quickly as possible on a whole bunch of different areas and

But I do think the existence of something like mirror life means we have to be careful about some parts of the technology tree and kind of shows that they're not all going to be beneficial.

So for me, it suggests we need to be humble about the types of things that might come up.

This wasn't on my radar at all until 18 months ago or something.

And now I think it could dominate a large fraction of biological risk.

There might be other things like this that come up in the future.

And so I think we need to be thinking about this, be on the lookout for them, and think seriously and carefully about the types of new technologies that we want to develop.

make us really really well i guess you've already used the word humble um yeah there could be there could be more and um we should take weird ideas about uh risky things seriously um good i am very optimistic though in this case that if we do the right things we have top people working on this we will be able to solve this problem another thing i think it shows is that spotting something early gives you time to think about it and to take the right action i think