Dwarkesh Patel interviews George Church:
Mirror life, if it can be weaponized, that would take it to a whole other level of concern. The concern was that if we got it to a certain point, then it would be easy to weaponize it. Again, there’s practical considerations that maybe that most people who consider weaponizing mirror life would probably be satisfied with weaponizing viruses that already exist, that are already pathogens. And they wouldn’t want to destroy themselves and their family and their legacy and everything like that. But all it takes is one, one group probably, or one person.
But your question is, is it inevitable? I don’t know. It might be. It’s quite possible it’s already here. In other words, we already have mirror life in our solar system or maybe even on our planet. It just hasn’t been weaponized.
What we were saying in the Science paper is that this seems like the sort of thing that could wipe out all competing life if were properly weaponized. But there are probably a few things like that. What we really need to do is reduce the motivation to do that, maybe increase our preparedness for a variety of existential threats. Some of which will be natural, some of which will be one disgruntled person who has essentially too much power.
Over the history of humanity, the amount of things that a single person can do has grown very significantly. It used to be, when you had your bare hands, there was kind of a limit to what one person could do. A large number of people could team up and get a mammoth or something like that. Today, one person with the right connections or right access to technology could blow up a city. That’s a huge increase in capability. I think we want to start dialing that back a little bit somehow.