80,000 Hours Podcast25 Feb 2020

Arden & Rob on demandingness, work-life balance & injustice (80k team chat #1)

Today's bonus episode of the podcast is a quick conversation between me and my fellow 80,000 Hours researcher Arden Koehler about a few topics, including the demandingness of morality, work-life balance, and emotional reactions to injustice.

Arden is about to graduate with a philosophy PhD from New York University, so naturally we dive right into some challenging implications of utilitarian philosophy and how it might be applied to real life. Issues we talk about include:

• If you’re not going to be completely moral, should you try being a bit more ethical, or give up?
• Should you feel angry if you see an injustice, and if so, why?
• How much should we ask people to live frugally?

So far the feedback on the post-episode chats that we've done have been positive, so we thought we'd go ahead and try out this freestanding one. But fair warning: it's among the more difficult episodes to follow, and probably not the best one to listen to first, as you'll benefit from having more context!

If you'd like to listen to more of Arden you can find her in episode 67, David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness, or episode 66, Peter Singer on being provocative, EA, and how his moral views have changed.

Here's more information on some of the issues we touch on:

• Consequentialism on Wikipedia
• Appropriate dispositions on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
• Demandingness objection on Wikipedia
• And a paper on epistemic normativity.

———

I mention the call for papers of the Academic Workshop on Global Priorities in the introduction — you can learn more here.

And finally, Toby Ord — one of our founding Trustees and a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University — has his new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity coming out next week. I've read it and very much enjoyed it. Find out where you can pre-order it here. We'll have an interview with him coming up soon.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(349)

AI 2027's author returns with a plan to change the ending | Daniel Kokotajlo

Last year, Daniel Kokotajlo and his colleagues published AI 2027 — a scenario read by millions, including US Vice President Vance. AI 2027 ended in human extinction or an irreversible concentration of...

27 Aug 3h 47min

#252 – Owain Evans on accidentally training AI models to be evil

Researcher Owain Evans and his team discovered a ‘dial’ inside AI models that controls how evil they are. Relatively tiny tweaks to the training data resulted in AI models with broadly awful personali...

20 Aug 2h 15min

#251 – The UK's former head AI safety scientist on how to solve alignment before superintelligence arrives | Geoffrey Irving

When should governments slow the race toward superintelligence? According to Geoffrey Irving, the careful answer is sometime in the past. The useful answer is now.Geoffrey — formerly a safety research...

11 Aug 2h 2min

#250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong

Both Silicon Valley and the public can’t get enough of ‘AGI timelines.’ But Toby Ord, senior researcher at Oxford’s AI Governance Initiative and author of The Precipice, believes we consistently make ...

6 Aug 2h 46min

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2026? – Rob Wiblin

Last October, famed coder Andrej Karpathy called AI agents “slop.” Two months later he completely reversed his view, describing them as “alien tools” that are “rocking the profession.”He was far from ...

4 Aug 49min

#249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world

If you genuinely believe that humanity could be wiped out by AI or a pandemic, what is the appropriate amount of fear to feel?“As much as possible” can seem like the only reasonable answer. If the wor...

28 Juli 2h 9min

#248 – Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe

Many AI researchers believe mass job displacement is coming — and some even think there’s a chance their technology will kill everyone. But they’re building it anyway. Writer and journalist Jasmine Su...

21 Juli 1h 6min

#247 – Anton Leicht on how middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world

In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore?Anton Leicht says once frontier AI becomes a core economic input, the countries that own it will p...

14 Juli 1h 33min