Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Produced by Keiran Harris. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 21 days 13 hours 48 minutes
#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, 'Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and they still stay alive. And we’ve modelled out every possibility and we’ve found that it works.' I think another possibility, which I don’t understand as well, is that AI could lock in current moral values...
#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 Substack Don’t Worry About the Vase, Zvi has spent as much time as literally anyone in the world over the last two years tracking in detail how the explosion of AI has been playing out — and he has strong opinions about almost every aspect of it.
Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript...
AI 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 impacts on humanity and potentially pose global catastrophic risks, and there are opportunities in the broad field of AI governance to positively shape how society responds to and prepares for the challenges posed by the technology...
#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 your problem.' What I’m trying to do often is give them other ways of thinking about what they’re doing, or giving different framings. A classic example of this would be someone who’s been working on a project for a long time and they feel really trapped by it...
#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 a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she’s willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her...
#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 muscles have to work? OK, and then if that's true, what would they have to look like at the cellular level for that to be true? Then what do we have to do to make that happen? In my head, it's much more about agency and what choice do I have over my health...
#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 global risk over the next two years — ranking it ahead of war, environmental problems, and other threats from AI...
#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 levels of physical ill health in young people...
#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 like? What time do I want to be spending? Which hours? How do I want the weekends to look? The things that are going to shape the way your day-to-day goes, and the time you spend with your kids, and what you're doing in that time with your kids, and all of those things: you have an opportunity to deliberately plan them...
#177 – Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps
Back in December, we released an episode where Rob Wiblin interviewed Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast — on his takes on the pace of development of AGI and the OpenAI leadership drama, based on his experience red teaming an early version of GPT-4 and the conversations with OpenAI staff and board members that followed.
Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript...