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 ...
6 Maalis 31min
#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...
3 Maalis 3h 25min
#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, ...
24 Helmi 2h 41min
#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, almos...
17 Helmi 2h 54min
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 ...
10 Helmi 25min
#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 p...
3 Helmi 2h 51min
#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 ...
27 Tammi 2h 31min
#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, et...
20 Tammi 2h 56min
