#196 – Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter
"In the 1980s, it was still apparently common to perform surgery on newborn babies without anaesthetic on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to appalling cases, and to public outcry, and to campaign...
15 Aug 20242h 1min
#195 – Sella Nevo on who's trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them
"Computational systems have literally millions of physical and conceptual components, and around 98% of them are embedded into your infrastructure without you ever having heard of them. And an inordin...
1 Aug 20242h 8min
#194 – Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government
"If you’re a power that is an island and that goes by sea, then you’re more likely to do things like valuing freedom, being democratic, being pro-foreigner, being open-minded, being interested in trad...
26 Jul 20243h 4min
#193 – Sihao Huang on navigating the geopolitics of US–China AI competition
"You don’t necessarily need world-leading compute to create highly risky AI systems. The biggest biological design tools right now, like AlphaFold’s, are orders of magnitude smaller in terms of comput...
18 Jul 20242h 23min
#192 – Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US
"Ring one: total annihilation; no cellular life remains. Ring two, another three-mile diameter out: everything is ablaze. Ring three, another three or five miles out on every side: third-degree burns ...
12 Jul 20241h 54min
#191 (Part 2) – Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI
This is the second part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The first episode is on the economy and national security after AGI. You can listen to them in either order!If we develop artificia...
5 Jul 20242h 20min
#191 (Part 1) – Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI
This is the first part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The second episode is on government and society after AGI. You can listen to them in either order!The human brain does what it does ...
27 Jun 20244h 14min
#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious
"One of the most amazing things about planet Earth is that there are complex bags of mostly water — you and me – and we can look up at the stars, and look into our brains, and try to grapple with the ...
7 Jun 20242h
