80,000 Hours Podcast

Apr 04 2025 281 ep. 134 mins 5.3k
80,000 Hours Podcast artwork

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. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.

  Education  Technology
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#214 – Buck Shlegeris on controlling AI that wants to take over – so we can use it anyway

Apr 04 2025 136 mins  
Most AI safety conversations centre on alignment: ensuring AI systems share our values and goals. But despite progress, we’re unlikely to know we’ve solved the problem before the arrival of human-level and superhuman systems in as little as three years.So some are developing a backup plan to safely deploy models we fear are actively scheming to harm us — so-called “AI contr

15 expert takes on infosec in the age of AI

Mar 28 2025 155 mins  
"There’s almost no story of the future going well that doesn’t have a part that’s like '…and no evil person steals the AI weights and goes and does evil stuff.' So it has highlighted the importance of information security: 'You’re training a powerful AI system; you should make it hard for someone to steal' has popped out to me as a thing that just keeps coming up in these

#213 – Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” – and how we're completely unprepared

Mar 11 2025 237 mins  
The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic engineering, the Big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, birth control, and more. Now imagine all of it compressed into just 10 years.That’s the future Will MacAskill — philosopher, founding figure of effectiv

Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui)

Mar 07 2025 36 mins  
When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely didn’t anticipate the legal labyrinth it now faces. A recent court order in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company suggests OpenAI’s restructuring faces serious legal threats, which will complicate its efforts to raise tens of billions in investment.As nonprofit legal expert R

#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value

Feb 25 2025 221 mins  
A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play?The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value’ — in which you multiply probabilities by th

#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons

Feb 19 2025 160 mins  
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is committed to 'dominating' in a nuc

#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway

Feb 14 2025 164 mins  
Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through.That’s how today’s guest Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capability becomes available, societies that adopt it tend to

Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)

Feb 12 2025 57 mins  
On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the for-profit company, plus the freedom to stick with its current charitable mission.For a normal company takeover bid, this would already be spicy. But OpenAI’s unique structure — a nonprofit foundation controlling a for-profit corp

AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out

Feb 10 2025 192 mins  
Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation overblown? Will it prove easy or hard to create AGI? And how likely is it that it will feel like something to be a superhuman AGI?With AGI back in the headlines, we bring you 15 opinionated highlights from the show addressing those and other questions, intermixed with opinions from hos

#124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions

Feb 07 2025 190 mins  
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying something positive. But according to today's guest Karen Levy — deworming pioneer and veteran of Innovations for Poverty Action, Evidence Action, and Y Combinator — each of those three concepts has become so fashionable that they're a