Podcast Episodes

#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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 months, 2 weeks ago

#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 Ka…

Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago

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…

Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago

#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 i…

Published on 6 months, 4 weeks ago

#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, wis…

Published on 7 months ago

#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 ob…

Published on 7 months, 1 week ago

#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 …

Published on 7 months, 2 weeks ago