Shows / 80,000 Hours Podcast
80,000 Hours Podcast
The most important conversations about artificial intelligence you won’t hear anywhere else. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Luisa Rodriguez, Zershaaneh Qureshi, and Tom Reed.
Episodes
80,000 Hours Podcast#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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#189 – Rachel Glennerster on why we still don’t have vaccines that could save millions
"You can’t charge what something is worth during a pandemic. So we estimated that the value of one course of COVID vaccine in January 2021 was over $5,000…
80,000 Hours Podcast#188 – Matt Clancy on whether science is good
"Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for example — I’m just making this up — but we give people…
80,000 Hours Podcast#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard"
"Earth economists, when they measure how bad the potential for exploitation is, they look at things like, how is labour mobility? How much possibility do…
80,000 Hours Podcast#186 – Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives
"I work in a place called Uttar Pradesh, which is a state in India with 240 million people. One in every 33 people in the whole world lives in Uttar Pradesh…
80,000 Hours Podcast#185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals
"The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say…
80,000 Hours Podcast#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing machine — which he definitely is. As the author of the…
80,000 Hours PodcastAI governance and policy (Article)
Today’s release is a reading of our career review of AI governance and policy, written and narrated by Cody Fenwick. Advanced AI systems could have massive…
80,000 Hours Podcast#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more
"When a friend comes to me with a decision, and they want my thoughts on it, very rarely am I trying to give them a really specific answer, like, 'I solved…
80,000 Hours Podcast#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more
"[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to…
80,000 Hours Podcast#181 – Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond
"The question I care about is: What do I want to do? Like, when I'm 80, how strong do I want to be? OK, and then if I want to be that strong, how well do my…
80,000 Hours Podcast#180 – Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated
The World Economic Forum’s global risks survey of 1,400 experts, policymakers, and industry leaders ranked misinformation and disinformation as the number one…
80,000 Hours Podcast#179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar…
80,000 Hours Podcast#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting
"I think at various times — before you have the kid, after you have the kid — it's useful to sit down and think about: What do I want the shape of this to look…
80,000 Hours Podcast#177 – Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps
Back in December we spoke with Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast — about the speed of progress towards AGI and…
80,000 Hours Podcast#90 Classic episode – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through 10 — each…
80,000 Hours Podcast#112 Classic episode – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to…
80,000 Hours Podcast#111 Classic episode – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language, stealing oil…
80,000 Hours Podcast2023 Mega-highlights Extravaganza
Happy new year! We've got a different kind of holiday release for you today. Rather than a 'classic episode,' we've put together one of our favourite…
80,000 Hours Podcast#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome
Today’s episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do…
80,000 Hours Podcast#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models
OpenAI says its mission is to build AGI — an AI system that is better than human beings at everything. Should the world trust them to do that safely? That’s…
80,000 Hours Podcast#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
Lead is one of the most poisonous things going. A single sugar sachet of lead, spread over a park the size of an American football field, is enough to give a…
80,000 Hours Podcast#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers
"It will change everything: it will change our workplaces, it will change our interactions with the government, it will change our interactions with each…
80,000 Hours Podcast#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe
"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristics to them, even when they lack those characteristics. But we…
80,000 Hours Podcast#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it? It's common to think that 'staying informed' and…
80,000 Hours Podcast#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts going back over time, is that really, the more of these…
80,000 Hours Podcast#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets…
80,000 Hours Podcast#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
"One of our earliest supporters and a dear friend of mine, Mark Lampert, once said to me, “The way I think about it is, imagine that this money were already in…
80,000 Hours Podcast#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion
"If we carry on looking at these industrialised economies, not thinking about what it is they're actually doing and what the potential of this is, you can make…
80,000 Hours Podcast#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these kinds of problems. But because we're just so early on with…
80,000 Hours Podcast#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
"If you and I and 100 other people were on the first ship that was going to go settle Mars, and were going to build a human civilisation, and we have to decide…
80,000 Hours Podcast#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in this kind of advanced future? Right now, if somebody's…
80,000 Hours Podcast#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first people who…
80,000 Hours PodcastGreat power conflict (Article)
Today’s release is a reading of our Great power conflict problem profile, written and narrated by Stephen Clare. If you want to check out the links, footnotes…
80,000 Hours Podcast#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do
Effective altruism is associated with the slogan "do the most good." On one level, this has to be unobjectionable: What could be bad about helping people more…
80,000 Hours PodcastThe 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023)
An audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours career guide, also available on our website, on Amazon, and on Audible. If you know someone who might find our career…
80,000 Hours Podcast#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI
Mustafa Suleyman was part of the trio that founded DeepMind, and his new AI project is building one of the world's largest supercomputers to train a large…
80,000 Hours Podcast#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite
"Do you remember seeing these photographs of generally women sitting in front of these huge panels and connecting calls, plugging different calls between…
80,000 Hours Podcast#160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment
"There's no money to invest in education elsewhere, so they almost get trapped in the cycle where they don't get a lot from crop production, but everyone in…
80,000 Hours Podcast#159 – Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less
In July, OpenAI announced a new team and project: Superalignment. The goal is to figure out how to make superintelligent AI systems aligned and safe to use…
80,000 Hours PodcastWe now offer shorter 'interview highlights' episodes
Over on our other feed, 80k After Hours, you can now find 20-30 minute highlights episodes of our 80,000 Hours Podcast interviews. These aren’t necessarily the…
80,000 Hours Podcast#158 – Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they're no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk
Back in 2007, Holden Karnofsky cofounded GiveWell, where he sought out the charities that most cost-effectively helped save lives. He then cofounded Open…
80,000 Hours Podcast#157 – Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it
In Oppenheimer, scientists detonate a nuclear weapon despite thinking there's some 'near zero' chance it would ignite the atmosphere, putting an end to life on…
80,000 Hours Podcast#156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models
"At the front of the pack we have these frontier AI developers, and we want them to identify particularly dangerous models ahead of time. Once those mines have…
80,000 Hours PodcastBonus: The Worst Ideas in the History of the World
Today’s bonus release is a pilot for a new podcast called ‘The Worst Ideas in the History of the World’, created by Keiran Harris — producer of the 80,000…
80,000 Hours Podcast#155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after
As AI advances ever more quickly, concerns about potential misuse of highly capable models are growing. From hostile foreign governments and terrorists to…
80,000 Hours Podcast#154 - Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters
Can there be a more exciting and strange place to work today than a leading AI lab? Your CEO has said they're worried your research could cause human…
80,000 Hours Podcast#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on 2 big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and 6 lessons from their recent work
GiveWell is one of the world's best-known charity evaluators, with the goal of "searching for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar." It…
80,000 Hours Podcast#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion
What is the nature of the universe? How do we make decisions correctly? What differentiates right actions from wrong ones? Such fundamental questions have been…
80,000 Hours Podcast#151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us
Imagine you are an orphaned eight-year-old whose parents left you a $1 trillion company, and no trusted adult to serve as your guide to the world. You have to…
80,000 Hours Podcast#150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world
It’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came from. For example: what if we told you that within 15 years…
80,000 Hours PodcastAndrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project (80k After Hours)
In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which he cofounded in…
80,000 Hours Podcast#149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating
Being a good and successful person is core to your identity. You place great importance on meeting the high moral, professional, or academic standards you set…
80,000 Hours Podcast#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't
If you want to work to tackle climate change, you should try to reduce expected carbon emissions by as much as possible, right? Strangely, no. Today's guest…
80,000 Hours Podcast#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experiments in top social science journals don't get the same…
80,000 Hours Podcast#146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren't conscious
By now, you’ve probably seen the extremely unsettling conversations Bing’s chatbot has been having. In one exchange, the chatbot told a user: "I have a…