#202 – Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science
"For every far-out idea that turns out to be true, there were probably hundreds that were simply crackpot ideas. In general, [science] advances building on the knowledge we have, and seeing what the n...
19 Sep 20242h 20min
#201 – Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet
"Perception is quite difficult with cameras: even if you have a stereo camera, you still can’t really build a map of where everything is in space. It’s just very difficult. And I know that sounds surp...
13 Sep 20242h 1min
#200 – Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks
"It’s very hard to find examples where people say, 'I’m starting from this point. I’m starting from this belief.' So we wanted to make that very legible to people. We wanted to say, 'Experts think thi...
4 Sep 20242h 49min
#199 – Nathan Calvin on California’s AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy
"I do think that there is a really significant sentiment among parts of the opposition that it’s not really just that this bill itself is that bad or extreme — when you really drill into it, it feels ...
29 Aug 20241h 12min
#198 – Meghan Barrett on upending everything you thought you knew about bugs in 3 hours
"This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poorly covered in our science curriculum; they are especially poorly understood, because people don’t s...
26 Aug 20243h 48min
#197 – Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic's AI safety policy is up to the task
The three biggest AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — have now all released policies designed to make their AI models less likely to go rogue or cause catastrophic damage as they approach...
22 Aug 20242h 29min
#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
