80,000 Hours Podcast
The 80,000 Hours Podcast features in-depth conversations about the most pressing issues in artificial intelligence and global priorities. Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Luisa Rodriguez, and Zershaaneh Qureshi, the show explores topics that are often overlooked by mainstream media. It aims to help listeners think more clearly about how to have a positive impact with their careers.
Episodes
We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.
Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decisions people have to make today.In this video, Rob Wiblin walks through a fascinating analysis from researcher Beren Millidge that uses known physics — no wormholes or faster-than-light travel — to identify the only three weapons that could w
How AI could create the world’s biggest problems (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
Imagine you’re living 15,000 years ago. Your people are hunter-gatherers and you sleep under the stars. If someone told you humans would one day build cities with millions of people, fly through the air, or carry all human knowledge in their pockets, you couldn’t even begin to picture what they meant... Yet here we are.How did our lives change so far beyond recognition? The story is compl
What it's really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with 'doomers') | Rohin Shah
Most people working on AI safety think without a massive effort AI systems will probably end up with goals catastrophically different from humanity’s. Today’s guest, Rohin Shah — head of AGI Safety and Alignment at Google DeepMind, and an AI safety researcher since 2017 — disagrees.“There is no particularly compelling argument that this is the thing that happens by default,” Rohin explain
What makes for a dream job? | Benjamin Todd
What actually makes a job fulfilling? It's not what most career advice tells you. "Follow your passion" sounds inspiring, but it's misleading — and the research backs that up.Drawing on hundreds of studies, we’ve identified five key ingredients of a dream job. High income barely moves the needle. Low stress is actually counterproductive. And the correlation between doing what you already
We’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history | Benjamin Todd, author of 80,000 Hours
The average career is 80,000 hours long. With AI advancing so rapidly, the hours you have left in your career matter more than ever.Some leading AI researchers think there’s a 10% chance that AI systems begin automating AI research itself this year — and a 60% chance by the end of 2028. This could introduce aggressive feedback loops that completely reshape every industry, institution, and
Can AIs already start 'rogue deployments' inside AI companies? (Landmark new METR report)
A red-teamer was embedded inside Anthropic for three weeks, told to imagine he was an evil Claude, and asked to figure out how to launch a ‘rogue AI deployment’ without getting caught. It’s one part of a landmark report released yesterday by METR — the outfit behind the task-completion time horizon graph which has become the single most watched measure of AI progress.This major new resear
#243 – 'Godfather of AI' Yoshua Bengio: "I now see a path" to safe superintelligent AI
The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he's figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and never goes rogue. Yoshua Bengio – Turing Award Winner and founder of LawZero – is disturbed by the many unintended drives and goals present in today's AIs, their willingness to lie, and ability to tell when they're being tested. AI companies ar
'95% of AI Pilots Fail': The hidden agenda behind the viral stat that misled millions
You might have heard that '95% of corporate AI pilots' are failing. It was one of the most widely cited AI statistics of 2025, parroted by media outlets everywhere. It helped trigger a Nasdaq selloff and became a pillar of the case that 'AI is overhyped'. The problem: it's 100% wrong. And not by accident either.If you carefully read the underlying report, ostensibly from MIT, you find the
#242 – Will MacAskill on how we survive the 'intelligence explosion,' AI character, and the case for 'viatopia'
Hundreds of millions already turn to AI on the most personal of topics — therapy, political opinions, and how to treat others. And as AI takes over more of the economy, the character of these systems will shape culture on an even grander scale, ultimately becoming “the personality of most of the world’s workforce.”So… should they be designed to push us towards the better angels of our nat
Risks from power-seeking AI systems (article narration by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
Hundreds of prominent AI scientists and other notable figures signed a statement in 2023 saying that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. At 80,000 Hours, we’ve considered risks from AI to be the world’s most pressing problem since 2016. But what led us to this conclusion? Could AI really cause human extinction? We’re not certain, but we think the risk is
How scary is Claude Mythos? 303 pages in 21 minutes
With Claude Mythos we have an AI that knows when it's being tested, can obscure its reasoning when it wants, and is better at breaking into (and out of) computers than any human alive. Rob Wiblin works through its 244-page System Card and 59-page Alignment Risk Update to explain why: Mythos is a nightmare for computer securityIt has arrived far ahead of scheduleIt might be great news for
Village gossip, pesticide bans, and gene drives: 17 experts on the future of global health
What does it really take to lift millions out of poverty and prevent needless deaths?In this special compilation episode, 17 past guests — including economists, nonprofit founders, and policy advisors — share their most powerful and actionable insights from the front lines of global health and development. You’ll hear about the critical need to boost agricultural productivity in sub-Sahar
What everyone is missing about Anthropic vs the Pentagon. And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think.
When the Pentagon tried to strong-arm Anthropic into dropping its ban on AI-only kill decisions and mass domestic surveillance, the company refused. Its critics went on the attack: Anthropic and its supporters are some combination of 'hypocritical', 'naive', and 'anti-democratic'. Rob Wiblin dissects each claim finding that all three are mediocre arguments dressed up as hard truths. (Thou
#241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong?
Last September, scientists used an AI model to design genomes for entirely new bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). They then built them in a lab. Many were viable. And despite being entirely novel some even outperformed existing viruses from that family.That alone is remarkable. But as today’s guest — Dr Richard Moulange, one of the world’s top experts on ‘AI–Biosecurity’ — exp
#240 – Samuel Charap on how a Ukraine ceasefire could accidentally set Europe up for a bigger war
Many people believe a ceasefire in Ukraine will leave Europe safer. But today's guest lays out how a deal could potentially generate insidious new risks — leaving us in a situation that's equally dangerous, just in different ways.That’s the counterintuitive argument from Samuel Charap, Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND. He’s not worried about a Russian blitzkrieg on
#239 – Rose Hadshar on why automating all human labour will break our political system
The most important political question in the age of advanced AI might not be who wins elections. It might be whether elections continue to matter at all.That’s the view of Rose Hadshar, researcher at Forethought, who believes we could see extreme, AI-enabled power concentration without a coup or dramatic ‘end of democracy’ moment.She foresees something more insidious: an elite group with
#238 – Sam Winter-Levy and Nikita Lalwani on how AGI won't end mutually assured destruction (probably)
How AI interacts with nuclear deterrence may be the single most important question in geopolitics — one that may define the stakes of today’s AI race. Nuclear deterrence rests on a state’s capacity to respond to a nuclear attack with a devastating nuclear strike of its own. But some theorists think that sophisticated AI could eliminate this capability — for example, by locating and destro
Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen before — and with less time to get them right. But AI development also presents an opportunity: we could build and deploy AI tools that help us think more clearly, act more wisely, and coordinate more effectively. And if we roll these decision-m
#237 – Robert Long on how we're not ready for AI consciousness
Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re not.’ What do we do with that?Robert Long founded Eleos AI to explore questions like these, on the basis that AI may one day be capable of suffering — or already is. In today’s episode, Robert and host Luisa Rodrigu
#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed
Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design is an AGI that defers entirely to its human operators, has no views about how the world ought to be, is willingly modifiable, and completely indifferent to being shut down — a strategy no AI company is working on at all.In Max’s view any grander
#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’
Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It sounds circular, almost satirical. But is it actually a bad plan?Today’s guest, Ajeya Cotra, recently placed 3rd out of 413 participants forecasting AI developments and is among the most thoughtful and respected c
What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?
In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of 2025, sentiment swung all the way back in the other direction, with people's forecasts for when AI might really shake up the world blowing out even further than they had been before reasoning
#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young people. At any point in time, something like 20% of young people are working through anxiety or depression that’s seriously interfering with their lives — but nowhere near 20% of people in the
#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy
Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the “gradual disempowerment” of humanity.For most of history, ordinary people had almost no control over their governments. Liberal democracy emerged only recently, and probably not coincidentally around the Industrial Revo
#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success.It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc of history “bends toward justice,” and th
#233 – James Smith on how to prevent a mirror life catastrophe
When James Smith first heard about mirror bacteria, he was sceptical. But within two weeks, he’d dropped everything to work on it full time, considering it the worst biothreat that he’d seen described. What convinced him?Mirror bacteria would be constructed entirely from molecules that are the mirror images of their naturally occurring counterparts. This seemingly trivial difference creat
#144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer.But today’s guest Athena Aktipis says that the opposite of cancer is us: it's having a functional multicellular body that’s cooperating effectively in order to make that multicellular body function.If, like us, yo
#142 Classic episode – John McWhorter on why the optimal number of languages might be one, and other provocative claims about language
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything and everything. On top of his academic work, he's written 22 books, produced five online university courses, hosts one and a half podcasts, and now writes a regular New York Times op-ed colu
2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests
It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including:Kyle Fish explaining how Anthropic’s AI Claude descends into spiritual woo when left to talk to itselfIan Dunt on why the unelected House of Lords is by far the best part of the British governmentSam Bowman’s strategy to get NIMBYs to love it when
#232 – Andreas Mogensen on what we owe 'philosophical Vulcans' and unconscious beings
Most debates about the moral status of AI systems circle the same question: is there something that it feels like to be them? But what if that’s the wrong question to ask? Andreas Mogensen — a senior researcher in moral philosophy at the University of Oxford — argues that so-called 'phenomenal consciousness' might be neither necessary nor sufficient for a being to deserve moral considerat
#231 – Paul Scharre on how AI-controlled robots will and won't change war
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, sat in a bunker watching a red screen flash “MISSILE LAUNCH.” Protocol demanded he report it to superiors, which would very likely trigger a retaliatory nuclear strike. Petrov didn’t. He reasoned that if the US were actually attacking, they wouldn’t fire just 5 missiles — they’d empty the silos. He bet the fate of the world on a hunc
AI might let a few people control everything — permanently (article by Rose Hadshar)
Power is already concentrated today: over 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, the three richest men in the world are worth over $1 trillion, and almost six billion people live in countries without free and fair elections.This is a problem in its own right. There is still substantial distribution of power though: global income inequality is falling, over two billion people live
#230 – Dean Ball on how AI is a huge deal — but we shouldn’t regulate it yet
Former White House staffer Dean Ball thinks it's very likely some form of 'superintelligence' arrives in under 20 years. He thinks AI being used for bioweapon research is "a real threat model, obviously." He worries about dangerous "power imbalances" should AI companies reach "$50 trillion market caps." And he believes the agriculture revolution probably worsened human health and wellbein
#229 – Marius Hobbhahn on the race to solve AI scheming before models go superhuman
We often worry about AI models “hallucinating” or making honest mistakes. But what happens when a model knows the truth, but decides to deceive you anyway to achieve a goal of its own? This isn’t sci-fi — it’s happening regularly in deployment today. Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of the world’s top research organisation focused on AI deception (Apollo Research), has been collaborating with OpenAI
Rob & Luisa chat kids, the 2016 fertility crash, and how the 50s invented parenting that makes us miserable
Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the rate of decline has increased 4.5-fold. In many wealthy countries, fertility is now below 1.5. While we don’t notice it yet, in time that will mean the population halves every 60 years.Rob Wiblin is already a parent and Luisa Rodriguez is abou
#228 – Eileen Yam on how we're completely out of touch with what the public thinks about AI
If you work in AI, you probably think it’s going to boost productivity, create wealth, advance science, and improve your life. If you’re a member of the American public, you probably strongly disagree.In three major reports released over the last year, the Pew Research Center surveyed over 5,000 US adults and 1,000 AI experts. They found that the general public holds many beliefs about AI
OpenAI: The nonprofit refuses to be killed (with Tyler Whitmer)
Last December, the OpenAI business put forward a plan to completely sideline its nonprofit board. But two state attorneys general have now blocked that effort and kept that board very much alive and kicking.The for-profit’s trouble was that the entire operation was founded on the premise of — and legally pledged to — the purpose of ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits a
#227 – Helen Toner on the geopolitics of AGI in China and the Middle East
With the US racing to develop AGI and superintelligence ahead of China, you might expect the two countries to be negotiating how they’ll deploy AI, including in the military, without coming to blows. But according to Helen Toner, director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in DC, “the US and Chinese governments are barely talking at all.”In her role as a founder, and now l
#226 – Holden Karnofsky on unexploited opportunities to make AI safer — and all his AGI takes
For years, working on AI safety usually meant theorising about the ‘alignment problem’ or trying to convince other people to give a damn. If you could find any way to help, the work was frustrating and low feedback.According to Anthropic’s Holden Karnofsky, this situation has now reversed completely.There are now large amounts of useful, concrete, shovel-ready projects with clear goals an
#225 – Daniel Kokotajlo on what a hyperspeed robot economy might look like
When Daniel Kokotajlo talks to security experts at major AI labs, they tell him something chilling: “Of course we’re probably penetrated by the CCP already, and if they really wanted something, they could take it.”This isn’t paranoid speculation. It’s the working assumption of people whose job is to protect frontier AI models worth billions of dollars. And they’re not even trying that har
#224 – There's a cheap and low-tech way to save humanity from any engineered disease | Andrew Snyder-Beattie
Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity’s single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong.Andrew’s job at Open Philanthropy is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect as much
Inside the Biden admin’s AI policy approach | Jake Sullivan, Biden’s NSA | via The Cognitive Revolution
Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on The Cognitive Revolution podcast in August to discuss AI as a critical national security issue. We thought it was such a good interview and we wanted more people to see it, so we’re cross-posting it here on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.Jake and host Nathan Labenz discuss:Jake’s four-category framework
#223 – Neel Nanda on leading a Google DeepMind team at 26 – and advice if you want to work at an AI company (part 2)
At 26, Neel Nanda leads an AI safety team at Google DeepMind, has published dozens of influential papers, and mentored 50 junior researchers — seven of whom now work at major AI companies. His secret? “It’s mostly luck,” he says, but “another part is what I think of as maximising my luck surface area.”Video, full transcript, and links to learn more: https://80k.info/nn2This means creating
#222 – Can we tell if an AI is loyal by reading its mind? DeepMind's Neel Nanda (part 1)
We don’t know how AIs think or why they do what they do. Or at least, we don’t know much. That fact is only becoming more troubling as AIs grow more capable and appear on track to wield enormous cultural influence, directly advise on major government decisions, and even operate military equipment autonomously. We simply can’t tell what models, if any, should be trusted with such authority
#221 – Kyle Fish on the most bizarre findings from 5 AI welfare experiments
What happens when you lock two AI systems in a room together and tell them they can discuss anything they want?According to experiments run by Kyle Fish — Anthropic’s first AI welfare researcher — something consistently strange: the models immediately begin discussing their own consciousness before spiraling into increasingly euphoric philosophical dialogue that ends in apparent meditativ
How not to lose your job to AI (article by Benjamin Todd)
About half of people are worried they’ll lose their job to AI. They’re right to be concerned: AI can now complete real-world coding tasks on GitHub, generate photorealistic video, drive a taxi more safely than humans, and do accurate medical diagnosis. And over the next five years, it’s set to continue to improve rapidly. Eventually, mass automation and falling wages are a real possibilit
Rebuilding after apocalypse: What 13 experts say about bouncing back
What happens when civilisation faces its greatest tests?This compilation brings together insights from researchers, defence experts, philosophers, and policymakers on humanity’s ability to survive and recover from catastrophic events. From nuclear winter and electromagnetic pulses to pandemics and climate disasters, we explore both the threats that could bring down modern civilisation and
#220 – Ryan Greenblatt on the 4 most likely ways for AI to take over, and the case for and against AGI in <8 years
Ryan Greenblatt — lead author on the explosive paper “Alignment faking in large language models” and chief scientist at Redwood Research — thinks there’s a 25% chance that within four years, AI will be able to do everything needed to run an AI company, from writing code to designing experiments to making strategic and business decisions.As Ryan lays out, AI models are “marching through th
#219 – Toby Ord on graphs AI companies would prefer you didn't (fully) understand
The era of making AI smarter just by making it bigger is ending. But that doesn’t mean progress is slowing down — far from it. AI models continue to get much more powerful, just using very different methods, and those underlying technical changes force a big rethink of what coming years will look like.Toby Ord — Oxford philosopher and bestselling author of The Precipice — has been trackin
#218 – Hugh White on why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that’s probably good
For decades, US allies have slept soundly under the protection of America’s overwhelming military might. Donald Trump — with his threats to ditch NATO, seize Greenland, and abandon Taiwan — seems hell-bent on shattering that comfort.But according to Hugh White — one of the world's leading strategic thinkers, emeritus professor at the Australian National University, and author of Hard New
#217 – Beth Barnes on the most important graph in AI right now — and the 7-month rule that governs its progress
AI models today have a 50% chance of successfully completing a task that would take an expert human one hour. Seven months ago, that number was roughly 30 minutes — and seven months before that, 15 minutes.These are substantial, multi-step tasks requiring sustained focus: building web applications, conducting machine learning research, or solving complex programming challenges.Today’s gue
Beyond human minds: The bewildering frontier of consciousness in insects, AI, and more
What if there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp — or a chatbot?For centuries, humans have debated the nature of consciousness, often placing ourselves at the very top. But what about the minds of others — both the animals we share this planet with and the artificial intelligences we’re creating?We’ve pulled together clips from past conversations with researchers and philosophers who’ve
Don’t believe OpenAI’s “nonprofit” spin (emergency pod with Tyler Whitmer)
OpenAI’s recent announcement that its nonprofit would “retain control” of its for-profit business sounds reassuring. But this seemingly major concession, celebrated by so many, is in itself largely meaningless.Litigator Tyler Whitmer is a coauthor of a newly published letter that describes this attempted sleight of hand and directs regulators on how to stop it.As Tyler explains, the plan
The case for and against AGI by 2030 (article by Benjamin Todd)
More and more people have been saying that we might have AGI (artificial general intelligence) before 2030. Is that really plausible? This article by Benjamin Todd looks into the cases for and against, and summarises the key things you need to know to understand the debate. You can see all the images and many footnotes in the original article on the 80,000 Hours website.In a nutshell:Four
Emergency pod: Did OpenAI give up, or is this just a new trap? (with Rose Chan Loui)
When attorneys general intervene in corporate affairs, it usually means something has gone seriously wrong. In OpenAI’s case, it appears to have forced a dramatic reversal of the company’s plans to sideline its nonprofit foundation, announced in a blog post that made headlines worldwide.The company’s sudden announcement that its nonprofit will “retain control” credits “constructive dialog
#216 – Ian Dunt on why governments in Britain and elsewhere can't get anything done – and how to fix it
When you have a system where ministers almost never understand their portfolios, civil servants change jobs every few months, and MPs don't grasp parliamentary procedure even after decades in office — is the problem the people, or the structure they work in?Today's guest, political journalist Ian Dunt, studies the systemic reasons governments succeed and fail.And in his book How Westminst
Serendipity, weird bets, & cold emails that actually work: Career advice from 16 former guests
How do you navigate a career path when the future of work is uncertain? How important is mentorship versus immediate impact? Is it better to focus on your strengths or on the world’s most pressing problems? Should you specialise deeply or develop a unique combination of skills?From embracing failure to finding unlikely allies, we bring you 16 diverse perspectives from past guests who’ve f
#215 – Tom Davidson on how AI-enabled coups could allow a tiny group to seize power
Throughout history, technological revolutions have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in society. The Industrial Revolution created conditions where democracies could flourish for the first time — as nations needed educated, informed, and empowered citizens to deploy advanced technologies and remain competitive.Unfortunately there’s every reason to think artificial general intelli
Guilt, imposter syndrome & doing good: 16 past guests share their mental health journeys
"We are aiming for a place where we can decouple the scorecard from our worthiness. It’s of course the case that in trying to optimise the good, we will always be falling short. The question is how much, and in what ways are we not there yet? And if we then extrapolate that to how much and in what ways am I not enough, that’s where we run into trouble." —Hannah BoettcherWhat happens when
#214 – Buck Shlegeris on controlling AI that wants to take over – so we can use it anyway
Most AI safety conversations centre on alignment: ensuring AI systems share our values and goals. But despite progress, we’re unlikely to know we’ve solved the problem before the arrival of human-level and superhuman systems in as little as three years.So some are developing a backup plan to safely deploy models we fear are actively scheming to harm us — so-called “AI control.” While this
15 expert takes on infosec in the age of AI
"There’s almost no story of the future going well that doesn’t have a part that’s like '…and no evil person steals the AI weights and goes and does evil stuff.' So it has highlighted the importance of information security: 'You’re training a powerful AI system; you should make it hard for someone to steal' has popped out to me as a thing that just keeps coming up in these stories, keeps b
#213 – Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” – and how we're completely unprepared
The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic engineering, the Big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, birth control, and more. Now imagine all of it compressed into just 10 years.That’s the future Will MacAskill — philosopher, founding figure of effective altruism,
Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui)
When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely didn’t anticipate the legal labyrinth it now faces. A recent court order in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company suggests OpenAI’s restructuring faces serious legal threats, which will complicate its efforts to raise tens of billions in investment.As nonprofit legal expert Rose Chan Loui
#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play?The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value’ — in which you multiply probabilities by the value of ea
#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is committed to 'dominating' in a nuclear war wi
#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway
Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through.That’s how today’s guest Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capability becomes available, societies that adopt it tend to outcompete those th
Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)
On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the for-profit company, plus the freedom to stick with its current charitable mission.For a normal company takeover bid, this would already be spicy. But OpenAI’s unique structure — a nonprofit foundation controlling a for-profit corporation — t
AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out
Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation overblown? Will it prove easy or hard to create AGI? And how likely is it that it will feel like something to be a superhuman AGI?With AGI back in the headlines, we bring you 15 opinionated highlights from the show addressing those and other questions, intermixed with opinions from hosts Luis
#124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying something positive. But according to today's guest Karen Levy — deworming pioneer and veteran of Innovations for Poverty Action, Evidence Action, and Y Combinator — each of those three concepts has become so fashionable that they're at risk of b
If digital minds could suffer, how would we ever know? (Article)
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the AI model LaMDA as a reply to Blake Lemoine in 2022. Based on the Google engineer’s interactions with the model as it was under development, Lemoine became convinced it was sentient and worthy of moral consideration — and decided to tell the world.Few experts in machine learning, philosophy of mi
#132 Classic episode – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it’s a fair bet that they don’t want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free.This problem exists in extreme form for AI companies. These days, the electricity and equipment required to train cutting-edge machine learning models that generate uncanny human text and images can cost tens or h
#138 Classic episode – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisdom, and plenty more.The question is a classic that makes for great dorm-room philosophy discussion. But it’s hardly just of academic interest. The issue of what (if anything) is intrinsically
#134 Classic episode – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obey their husbands, and commoners should obey their monarchs.Wind back 10,000 years and things look very different again. Most hunter-gatherer groups thought men who got too big for their britc
#140 Classic episode – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on the way out.But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so Better Angels has prompted a spirited debate, with datasets and statistical analyses
2024 Highlightapalooza! (The best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year)
"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… or the single best, most valuable, and most insight-dense episode we put out in the entire year, depending on how you want to look at it." — Rob WiblinIt’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode, including:How to use the microph
#211 – Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed and what would actually work
Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who don’t want houses, offices, power stations, trains, subway stations (or whatever) built in their area can usually find some way to block them, even if the benefits to society outweigh the costs 10 or 100 times over.The result of this ‘vetocracy’ has been skyrocketing rent in major cities —
#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals
"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s easy, but I don’t see any reason to think that it’s impossible. And I think we have been making progress. I think there’s every reason to think that if we continue doing research, both at the th
#209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit
One OpenAI critic calls it “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right?Back in 2015 OpenAI was but a humble nonprofit. That nonprofit started a for-profit, OpenAI LLC, but made sure to retain ownership and control. But that for-profit, having become a tech giant with vast staffing and investment, has grown tired of its shackles and wants
#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world
"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going to be really important and shape the future are not in the Overton window, because they sound weird and off-putting and very futuristic. But I think stories are the best way to bring them in
#207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead
"I think one of the reasons I took [shutting down my charity] so hard is because entrepreneurship is all about this bets-based mindset. So you say, “I’m going to take a bunch of bets. I’m going to take some risky bets that have really high upside.” And this is a winning strategy in life, but maybe it’s not a winning strategy for any given hand. So the fact of the matter is that I believe
