#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 gover...
14 Feb 20252h 44min
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 with...
12 Feb 202557min
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 somet...
10 Feb 20253h 12min
#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 Kar...
7 Feb 20253h 10min
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 ...
4 Feb 20251h 14min
#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 in...
31 Jan 20252h 41min
#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, wisd...
22 Jan 20252h 25min
#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 obe...
15 Jan 20253h 40min
