Podcast Episodes

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 m…

Published on 6 months, 2 weeks ago

#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-lev…

Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago

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 o…

Published on 7 months ago

#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 Ban…

Published on 7 months, 2 weeks ago

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 aga…

Published on 7 months, 3 weeks ago

#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 …

Published on 8 months ago

#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 …

Published on 8 months, 1 week ago

#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 gove…

Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago

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 wit…

Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago

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 some…

Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago