#231 – Paul Scharre on how AI-controlled robots will and won't change war
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, sat in a bunker watching a red screen flash “MISSILE LAUNCH.” Protocol demanded he report it to superiors, which would very likely trigger a ret...
17 Dec 20252h 45min
AI might let a few people control everything — permanently (article by Rose Hadshar)
Power is already concentrated today: over 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, the three richest men in the world are worth over $1 trillion, and almost six billion people live in countries ...
12 Dec 20251h
#230 – Dean Ball on how AI is a huge deal — but we shouldn’t regulate it yet
Former White House staffer Dean Ball thinks it's very likely some form of 'superintelligence' arrives in under 20 years. He thinks AI being used for bioweapon research is "a real threat model, obvious...
10 Dec 20252h 54min
#229 – Marius Hobbhahn on the race to solve AI scheming before models go superhuman
We often worry about AI models “hallucinating” or making honest mistakes. But what happens when a model knows the truth, but decides to deceive you anyway to achieve a goal of its own? This isn’t sci-...
3 Dec 20253h 3min
Rob & Luisa chat kids, the 2016 fertility crash, and how the 50s invented parenting that makes us miserable
Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the rate of decline has increased 4.5-fold. In many weal...
25 Nov 20251h 59min
#228 – Eileen Yam on how we're completely out of touch with what the public thinks about AI
If you work in AI, you probably think it’s going to boost productivity, create wealth, advance science, and improve your life. If you’re a member of the American public, you probably strongly disagree...
20 Nov 20251h 43min
OpenAI: The nonprofit refuses to be killed (with Tyler Whitmer)
Last December, the OpenAI business put forward a plan to completely sideline its nonprofit board. But two state attorneys general have now blocked that effort and kept that board very much alive and k...
11 Nov 20251h 56min
#227 – Helen Toner on the geopolitics of AGI in China and the Middle East
With the US racing to develop AGI and superintelligence ahead of China, you might expect the two countries to be negotiating how they’ll deploy AI, including in the military, without coming to blows. ...
5 Nov 20252h 20min
