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 15 hours 7 minutes
#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...
#90 Classic episode – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in January 2021.
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 of which has a human in it. If it came up tails, I made ten billion boxes, labeled 1 through 10 billion — also with one human in each box...
#112 Classic episode – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2021.
Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation.
But the policy of US government agencies is already to spend up to $4 million to save the life of a citizen, making the death of all Americans a $1,300,000,000,000,000 disaster...
#111 Classic episode – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2021.
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 from pipelines.
The resulting oil spills damage the environment and cause severe health problems, but the Nigerian government has continually failed in their attempts to stop this theft...
2023 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 highlights from each episode of the show that came out in 2023.
That's 32 of our favourite ideas packed into one episode that's so bursting with substance it might be more than the human mind can safely handle...
#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in May 2021.
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 with making it!).
The producer of this show, Keiran Harris, interviewed our mutual colleague Howie about the major ways that mental illness has affected his life and career...
#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 this safely?
That’s the central theme of today’s episode with Nathan Labenz — entrepreneur, AI scout, and host of The Cognitive Revolution podcast.
Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript...
#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 child that regularly plays there lead poisoning. For life they’ll be condemned to a ~3-point-lower IQ; a 50% higher risk of heart attacks; and elevated risk of kidney disease, anaemia, and ADHD, among other effects.
We’ve known lead is a health nightmare for at least 50 years, and that got lead out of car fuel everywhere...
#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 other. It will make all of us unwitting neuromarketing subjects at all times, because at every moment in time, when you’re interacting on any platform that also has issued you a multifunctional device where they’re looking at your brainwave activity, they are marketing to you, they’re cognitively shaping you...
#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 also have a tendency towards anthropodenial — which involves denying that nonhumans have human characteristics, even when they have them. And those tendencies are both strong, and they can both be triggered by different types of systems. So which one is stronger, which one is more probable, is again going to be contextual...