#3 - Dr Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill 80,000 Hours 2026-09-20 | #3 - Dr Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill
What the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting | Emily Oster 80,000 Hours 2024-02-04 | _Originally released February 2024._ Host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Emily Oster — economist at Brown University, host of the _ParentData_ podcast, and the author of three hugely popular books that provide evidence-based insights into pregnancy and early childhood. Spoiler: Emily’s take is that lots of people probably obsess a bit too much about how individual parenting decisions affect kids’ outcomes — with only a couple of exceptions.In this episode:• The Mommy Wars [00:04:37]• Pregnancy [00:12:24]• Recent developments in pregnancy [00:30:29]• Childbirth [00:36:05]• First year to toddlerhood [00:56:46]• Careers and kids [01:15:13]• How much to work [01:39:30]• Cost of childcare [01:56:46]• When to have kids and fertility considerations [02:01:58]• Impact of kids on relationships [02:08:41]• How Emily can best contribute to the world [02:19:38]----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/emily-oster-pregnancy-parenting-careers
Navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationism | Nathan Labenz 80,000 Hours 2024-01-31 | _Originally released January 2024._ Host Rob Wiblin and AI scout Nathan Labenz dive deeper into what AI can and can’t do now — across language and visual models, medicine, scientific research, self-driving cars, robotics, and what the next big breakthrough might be. They also talk about discourse around AI and its risks online, and a sad decline in curiosity and open-mindedness about these issues; plus government abuse of AI, militarisation of AI, and how a curious listener can try to stay on top of everything that’s going on.In this episode:• What can AI do? [00:03:55]• Nowcasting vs forecasting [00:14:49]• Medicine [00:26:06]• Self-driving cars [00:38:04]• The next ChatGPT [00:49:50]• Robotics [00:58:37]• AI discourse [01:05:37]• Anti-regulation rhetoric backfiring [01:38:32]• Ethics and safety of AI today [02:09:39]• AI weapons [02:29:41]• Ways to keep up with AI progress [02:35:06]• Takeaways [02:41:34]----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary, and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-labenz-ai-breakthroughs-controversies
The final push for AGI, OpenAIs leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models | Nathan Labenz 80,000 Hours 2024-01-03 | _Originally released December 2023._ 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. Nathan saw the AI revolution coming years ago, and, astonished by the research he was seeing, set aside his role as CEO of Waymark and made it his full-time job to understand AI capabilities across every domain. He has been obsessively tracking the AI world since — including joining OpenAI’s “red team” that probed GPT-4 to find ways it could be abused, long before it was public.In this episode:• AI scout mindset [00:08:06]• Introduction to The Cognitive Revolution excerpt [00:11:50]• Excerpt from The Cognitive Revolution: Nathan's narrative [00:15:13]• Why it's hard to imagine a much better game board [01:18:10]• What OpenAI has been doing right [01:24:14]• Arms racing and China [01:36:04]• OpenAI's single-minded focus on AGI [01:42:10]• Transparency about capabilities [01:52:55]• Benefits of releasing models [02:01:56]• Was it OK to release GPT-4? [02:13:14]• Why no statement from the OpenAI board [02:30:31]• Ezra Klein on the OpenAI story [02:50:59]• The upside of AI merits taking some risk [03:12:59]• Meta and open source [03:26:44]• Nathan's journey into the AI world [03:37:26]----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-labenz-openai-red-team-safety
Scrutinising classic AI risk arguments | Ben Garfinkel 80,000 Hours 2023-12-12 | _Originally released July 2020._ Ben Garfinkel, Research Fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and Director of GovAI, supports the continued expansion of AI safety as a field and believes working on AI is among the very best ways to have a positive impact on the long-term future. But he also believes the classic AI risk arguments have been subject to insufficient scrutiny given this level of investment.In this episode:• Long-run implications of AI [00:06:48]• Political instability [00:15:25]• Lock-in scenarios [00:23:01]• Alignment problem [00:33:31]• High level overview of Bostrom [00:39:34]• Brain in a box [00:50:11]• Contenders for types of advanced systems [00:58:42]• Implications of smoothness [01:04:07]• Groups of people who disagree [01:18:28]• Orthogonality thesis [01:25:04]• Entanglement and capabilities [01:37:26]• Instrumental convergence [01:43:11]• Treacherous turn [02:07:55]• Where does this leave us? [02:15:19]----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-garfinkel-classic-ai-risk-arguments
Fads and misaligned incentives in global development | Karen Levy 80,000 Hours 2023-12-06 | _Originally released Mar 2022._ 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 at risk of being seriously overrated and applied where they don’t belong.Such concepts might even cause harm — trying to make a project embody all three is as likely to ruin it as help it flourish.In this episode:• Pre-policy plans [00:07:45]• ‘Sustainability’, and other myths in typical international development practice [00:20:45]• How the development industry sees evidence-based development [00:50:40]• Initiatives in Africa that should be significantly curtailed [00:55:39]• Misaligned incentives within the development industry [01:04:55]• Deworming: the early days [01:20:17]• The problem of deworming [01:33:36]• The importance of a theory of change [02:30:54]• Ways that things have changed since 2006 [02:35:16]• Academic work vs policy work [02:37:42]• Fit for Purpose [02:42:49]• Living in Kenya [02:59:41]• Underrated life advice [03:04:38]----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/karen-levy-misaligned-incentives-in-global-development
Working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree | Chris Olah 80,000 Hours 2023-11-29 | _Originally released August 2019._ Chris Olah has had a fascinating and unconventional career path.Most people who want to pursue a research career feel they need a degree to get taken seriously. But Chris not only doesn’t have a PhD, but doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. After dropping out of university to help defend an acquaintance who was facing bogus criminal charges, Chris started independently working on machine learning research, and eventually got an internship at Google Brain, a leading AI research group.In this interview — a follow-up to our episode on his technical work — we discuss what, if anything, can be learned from his unusual career path. Should more people pass on university and just throw themselves at solving a problem they care about? Or would it be foolhardy for others to try to copy a unique case like Chris’?In this episode:• Defending a falsely accused friend [00:04:24]• Why Chris didn’t go back to university [00:13:21]• Switching to machine learning [00:19:33]• How Chris got his foot in the door in machine learning [00:27:34]• DeepDream [00:30:52]• Lessons from Chris’ unconventional career track [00:38:13]• Is it important to go to grad school or work at the best lab? [00:46:01]• Strategies for growing as a researcher [00:50:17]• Cold emails [00:55:25]• Research as a market [00:59:02]• Explaining complex things really well [01:02:26]• Distill [01:13:12]• Micromarriages [01:19:28]----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-olah-unconventional-career-path
How to improve global health and wellbeing in clear, direct ways | Alexander Berger 80,000 Hours 2023-11-23 | _Originally released July 2021._ The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project, very different schools of thought have arisen about how to do the most good.Alexander Berger leads Open Philanthropy’s ‘Global Health and Wellbeing’ programme, where he oversees around $175 million in grants each year, and ultimately aspires to disburse billions in the most impactful ways he and his team can identify.This programme is the flagship effort representing one major effective altruist approach: try to improve the health and wellbeing of humans and animals that are alive today, in clearly identifiable ways, applying an especially analytical and empirical mindset.The programme makes grants to tackle easily-prevented illnesses among the world’s poorest people, offer cash to people living in extreme poverty, prevent cruelty to billions of farm animals, advance biomedical science, and improve criminal justice and immigration policy in the United States.Open Philanthropy’s researchers rely on empirical information to guide their decisions where it’s available, and where it’s not, they aim to maximise expected benefits to recipients through careful analysis of the gains different projects would offer and their relative likelihoods of success.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/alexander-berger-improving-global-health-wellbeing-clear-direct-ways
How emerging technologies could affect national security | Helen Toner 80,000 Hours 2023-11-14 | _Originally released July 2019._ From 1870 to 1950, the introduction of electricity transformed life in the US and UK, as people gained access to lighting, radio and a wide range of household appliances for the first time. Electricity turned out to be a general purpose technology that could help with almost everything people did.Some think machine learning could alter 21st century life in a similar way.In addition to massively changing everyday life, past general purpose technologies have also changed the nature of war. For example, when electricity was introduced to the battlefield, commanders gained the ability to quickly communicate with units far away in the field.How might international security be altered if the impact of machine learning is similar in scope to that of electricity? This episode's guest, Helen Toner, helped found the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University to help policymakers prepare for any such disruptive technical changes that might threaten international peace.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/helen-toner-on-security-and-emerging-technology
The perils of maximising the good that you do | Toby Ord 80,000 Hours 2023-11-10 | _Originally released September 2023._ 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 and more?But in this episode, Toby Ord — moral philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the founding figures of effective altruism — lays out three reasons to be cautious about the idea of maximising the good that you do. He suggests that rather than “doing the most good that we can,” perhaps we should be happy with a more modest and manageable goal: “doing most of the good that we can.”----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/toby-ord-perils-of-maximising-good
Will AI cause job loss, lower incomes and higher inequality — or the opposite? | Michael Webb 80,000 Hours 2023-11-09 | Luisa Rodriguez interviews economist Michael Webb of DeepMind, the UK Government, and Stanford University about how AI progress is going to affect people’s jobs and the labour market.They cover:• The jobs most and least exposed to AI• Whether we’ll we see mass unemployment in the short term• How long it took other technologies like electricity and computers to have economy-wide effects• Whether AI will increase or decrease inequality• Whether AI will lead to explosive economic growth• What we can we learn from history, and reasons to think this time is different• Career advice for a world of LLMs• Why Michael is starting a new org to relieve talent bottlenecks through accelerated learning, and how you can get involved• Michael’s take on AI-generated music, as a musician • And plenty more.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs-labour-market
Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome | 80,000 Hours 80,000 Hours 2023-11-08 | In this unique episode, our producer Keiran Harris interviews our colleague Howie about his personal experiences with mental illness and its impact on his life and career. The first half of this conversation is a searingly honest account of Howie’s story, including losing a job he loved due to a depressed episode, what it was like to be basically out of commission for over a year, how he got back on his feet, and the things he still finds difficult today.The second half covers practical advice. Conventional wisdom on mental health can be really focused on cultivating willpower — telling depressed people that the virtuous thing to do is to start exercising, improve their diet and sleep, and generally fix all their problems before turning to therapy and medication as some sort of last resort. Howie tries his best to be a corrective to this misguided attitude and pragmatically focus on what actually matters — doing whatever will help you get better.Mental illness is one of the things that most often trips up people who could otherwise enjoy flourishing careers and have a large social impact, so we think this could plausibly be one of our more valuable episodes.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/depression-anxiety-imposter-syndrome
The most important century for humanity | Holden Karnofsky 80,000 Hours 2023-11-02 | Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It’s natural to think that if we’re trying to be sober and measured, and predict what will really happen rather than spin an exciting story, it’s more likely than not to be sort of… dull.But there’s also good reason to think that that is simply impossible. The idea that there’s a boring future that’s internally coherent is an illusion that comes from not inspecting those scenarios too closely.At least that is what Holden Karnofsky — founder of charity evaluator GiveWell and foundation Open Philanthropy — argues in his new article series titled ‘The Most Important Century’. He hopes to lay out part of the worldview that’s driving the strategy and grantmaking of Open Philanthropy’s longtermist team, and encourage more people to join his efforts to positively shape humanity’s future.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-most-important-century
Three ways anyone can make a difference, no matter their job | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | With the right approach, you can make a major difference to the lives of others without changing jobs, or making a major sacrifice. You can do this by giving 10% of your income to the world’s poorest people, promoting important causes, or helping others to have a greater impact.Learn about three ways to make a difference in any job.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
A cheery final note — imagining your deathbed | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | We sum up the whole 80,000 Hours career guide, which helps you to find a fulfilling career that does good, in a few minutes.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
All the best advice we could find on how to get a job | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | Don’t just send out your CV in response to job listings. Get leads through your connections, and prove that you can do the work by actually doing some. When you get an offer, negotiate.Here we offer a summary of all the best advice on how to get the job you want.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
How to make your career plan | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | Rather than try to pinpoint the single best option, accept that your plan is likely to change. But don’t try to “keep your options open”. Instead, think about your career in three stages: exploring, building career capital, and deploying that career capital to have an impact. Then, sketch out a plan A, but also a plan B and plan Z in case it doesn’t work out. Update your plan every couple of years.Learn how to make a flexible A/B/Z career plan.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
One of the most powerful ways to improve your career — community | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | Join a community of people working in the same area as you. You’ll get hundreds of connections at once. And two people working together effectively can achieve more than they could individually. Every community’s unique, so try out several and see which are best for you and your career. If you liked this guide, then you’ll probably share aims with lots of people in the effective altruism community, which we helped start back in 2011.Here we explain how being part of a community can help.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
How to find the right career for you | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | Especially early in your career, take options that will give you career capital — skills, connections, credentials, character, and runway that put you in a better position to make a difference. Examples include working at high-performing growing organisations, graduate studies in certain subjects such as economics, or learning concrete skills like information security or China expertise. Be careful with humanities PhDs, charity jobs, and vocational qualifications.Get a list of ways to put yourself in a better position.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
Which jobs help people the most? | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | When we think of jobs that help people, medicine, teaching, and charity work are what first come to mind. But these are not always the highest-impact options. To help the most people, think broadly about the paths where you can make the biggest contribution, including research, communications and community-building, taking high-earning jobs to donate to charity, government and policy, and organisation-building.Here we lay out five types of high-impact career.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
Which jobs put you in the best long-term position? | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | Especially early in your career, take options that will give you career capital — skills, connections, credentials, character, and runway that put you in a better position to make a difference. Examples include working at high-performing growing organisations, graduate studies in certain subjects such as economics, or learning concrete skills like information security or China expertise. Be careful with humanities PhDs, charity jobs, and vocational qualifications.Here we lay out many strategies for putting yourself in a better position.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
Want to do good in your career? How to choose which area to focus on | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | To maximise your impact, work on areas (1) that are large in scale, (2) that others neglect, and (3) where it’s possible to make progress. Many people fail to compare the scale of different problems, work on the same problems as everyone else, and support programmes with no evidence of impact.Learn how to compare global problems.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
What’s the biggest and most urgent problem in the world? | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | Most people in rich countries who aim to do good work on health, poverty, and education in their home country. But health in poor countries is a bigger, more solvable problem, and only receives 4% of charitable donations. And we argue there are even bigger and more neglected issues, such as those involving existential risks and smarter-than-human AI.Here we explain what we’ve learnt about the world’s most urgent problems.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
Can one person make a difference? | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | Many common ways to do good, such as becoming a doctor, have less impact than you might first think. Other, more unconventional options, have allowed certain people to achieve an extraordinary impact (including one particular Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet military).Find out why your choice of career really matters for the world.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
What makes for a dream job? | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | Research shows that to have a fulfilling career, you should do something you’re good at that makes the world a better place. Don’t aim for a highly paid, easy job, or expect to discover your “passion” in a flash of insight.Find out the six key ingredients of fulfilling work.-----You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
Find a fulfilling career that does good | The 80,000 Hours career guide 80,000 Hours 2023-11-01 | You have 80,000 hours in your career. That’s a long time. Spend a few those hours on this guide, to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact.In the introduction, we cover what the 80,000 Hours career guide is based on and how to use it best.------Read the 2023 career guide with all its references and appendices on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/career-guide
What the hell is going on inside neural networks? | Chris Olah 80,000 Hours 2023-10-31 | Big machine learning models can identify plant species better than any human, write passable essays, beat you at Starcraft 2, figure out how a photo of Tobey Maguire and the word ‘spider’ are related, solve the 60-year-old ‘protein folding problem’, diagnose some diseases, play romantic matchmaker, write solid computer code, and offer questionable legal advice.Humanity made these amazing and ever-improving tools. So how do our creations work? In short: we don’t know.Chris Olah finds this both absurd and unacceptable. Over the last ten years he has been a leader in the effort to unravel what’s really going on inside these black boxes. As part of that effort he helped create the famous DeepDream visualisations at Google Brain, reverse engineered the CLIP image classifier at OpenAI, and is now continuing his work at Anthropic. ----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-olah-interpretability-research
What if dictators could live forever? | Anders Sandberg 80,000 Hours 2023-10-26 | Dr Anders Sandberg, who studies low-probability high-stakes risks and the impact of technological change at the Future of Humanity Institute, is the first guest to appear twice on the 80,000 Hours Podcast and might just be the most interesting academic at Oxford.In today’s episode, Rob Wiblin asks Anders:• Is it worth the money to freeze your body after death in the hope of future revival, like Anders has done?• How much is our perception of the risk of nuclear war biased by the fact that we wouldn’t be alive to think about it had one happened?• If biomedical research lets us slow down ageing would culture stagnate under the crushing weight of centenarians?• What long-shot drugs can people take in their 70s to stave off death?• Can science extend human (waking) life by cutting our need to sleep?• How bad would it be if a solar flare took down the electricity grid? Could it happen?• If you’re a scientist and you discover something exciting but dangerous, when should you keep it a secret and when should you share it?• Will lifelike robots make us more inclined to dehumanise one another?----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-extending-life
Where are the aliens? | Anders Sandberg 80,000 Hours 2023-10-26 | The universe is so vast, yet we don’t see any alien civilisations. If they exist, where are they? Anders has an original answer: they’re ‘sleeping’, and for a very compelling reason.The ‘aestivation hypothesis’ is the invention of Dr Sandberg, a Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, where he looks at low-probability, high-impact risks, predicting the capabilities of future technologies and very long-range futures for humanity.The fun and far-ranging conversation in this episode covers this and other possible explanations to the Fermi paradox, as well as questions like:• Should we want optimists or pessimists working on our most important problems?• How should we reason about low probability, high impact risks?• Would a galactic civilization want to stop the stars from burning?• What would be the best strategy for exploring and colonising the universe?• How can you stay coordinated when you’re spread across different galaxies?• What should humanity decide to do with its future?Update: In April 2019, the key theory Dr Sandberg puts forward for why aliens may delay their activities was strongly disputed in a new paper (arxiv.org/abs/1902.06730), which claims it is based on an incorrect understanding of the physics of computation.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-fermi-paradox
Why nature is not the greatest bioterrorist | Kevin Esvelt 80,000 Hours 2023-10-24 | Luisa Rodriguez interviews Kevin Esvelt — a biologist at the MIT Media Lab and the inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive — about the threat posed by engineered bioweapons.They cover:• Why it makes sense to focus on deliberately released pandemics• Case studies of people who actually wanted to kill billions of humans• How many people have the technical ability to produce dangerous viruses• The different threats of stealth and wildfire pandemics that could crash civilisation• The potential for AI models to increase access to dangerous pathogens• Why scientists try to identify new pandemic-capable pathogens, and the case against that research• Technological solutions, including UV lights and advanced PPE• Using CRISPR-based gene drive to fight diseases and reduce animal suffering• And plenty more.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/kevin-esvelt-stealth-wildfire-pandemics
Why are people so worried about AI? 80,000 Hours 2023-10-20 | How could AI systems go from helping college students cheat on tests to posing a threat to humanity? Watch the full video on our channel now.
War in space, grabby aliens, and the lifespan of civilisations | Anders Sandberg 80,000 Hours 2023-10-20 | Rob Wiblin speaks with repeat guest and audience favourite Anders Sandberg about the most impressive things that could be achieved in our universe given the laws of physics.They cover:• The epic new book Anders is working on, and whether he’ll ever finish it• Whether there’s a best possible world or we can just keep improving forever• What wars might look like if the galaxy is mostly settled• The impediments to AI or humans making it to other stars• How the universe will end a million trillion years in the future• Whether it’s useful to wonder about whether we’re living in a simulation• The 'grabby aliens' theory• Whether civilisations get more likely to fail the older they get• The best way to generate energy that could ever exist• Black hole bombs• Whether superintelligence is necessary to get a lot of value• The likelihood that life from elsewhere has already visited Earth• And plenty more.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-best-things-possible-in-our-universe
How to get Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI | Mustafa Suleyman 80,000 Hours 2023-09-25 | 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 language model on 10–100x the compute used to train ChatGPT.But far from the stereotype of the incorrigibly optimistic tech founder, Mustafa is deeply worried about the future, for reasons he lays out in his new book _The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma_ (coauthored with Michael Bhaskar). In _The Coming Wave_ Mustafa lays out a 10-part agenda for 'containment' -- that is to say, for limiting the negative and unforeseen consequences of emerging technologies.----The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mustafa-suleyman-getting-washington-and-silicon-valley-to-tame-ai
Why are people so worried about AI? 80,000 Hours 2023-09-21 | How could AI systems go from helping college students cheat on tests to posing a threat to humanity? Watch the full video on our channel now.
Could AI wipe out humanity? | Most pressing problems 80,000 Hours 2023-09-18 | Full article: 80k.info/ai-profile-videoThis is our first time producing this kind of video, so we’d really love to hear your feedback! Tell us what you thought of the video here: https://forms.gle/T9JGq5NA8Rrgf7NV6Or, if you’d like to read more on our research into the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them, find our website at https://80000hours.org. *CHAPTERS*0:00 Introduction0:46 Existential risk from AI02:45 AI systems are “black boxes”03:26 AI systems might develop secondary goals05:31 How could an AI disempower humanity?06:13 Maybe it’ll be fine06:51 Misuse of AI07:18 The future is uncertain08:16 Solutions09:09 Conclusion*CREDITS*Written and Directed by Phoebe Brookspbrooksfilms.comNarrator - Luisa RodriguezDirector of Photography - Jack WorrallProduction Designer - Anna ShearingCamera Assistant - Ciaron CraigGaffer - Alex CullenExecutive Producer - Bella ForristalWith thanks to Benjamin Hilton, Arden Koehler, Kempe Gay-Brydges, Nik Mastroddi, Cody Fenwick, Matt Reardon, and Lauren Kuhns.*OUR RESEARCH*Preventing an AI-related catastrophe: 80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligenceAI safety technical research: 80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-safety-researcherAI governance and coordination: 80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-policy-and-strategyAnd all our articles and podcasts on AI: 80000hours.org/topic/world-problems/most-pressing-problems/artificial-intelligence Our research principles: 80000hours.org/about/credibility/research-principles *BIBLIOGRAPHY*Hilton (2022) 80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence Stein-Perlman et al. (2022) web.archive.org/web/20221016004611/aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai Centre for AI Safety (2023) safe.ai/statement-on-ai-riskBergal & Beckstead (2021) alignmentforum.org/posts/CzZ6Fch4JSpwCpu6C/interpretability Carlsmith (2022) arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353Russell (2020) 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/stuart-russell-human-compatible-ai Turner et al. (2019) arxiv.org/abs/1912.01683 Russell (2019) https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/hc.html O’Brien & Nelson (2020) liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/hs.2019.0122Garfinkel (2021) docs.google.com/document/d/1FlGPHU3UtBRj4mBPkEZyBQmAuZXnyvHU-yaH-TiNt8w/edit Cotra (2020) docs.google.com/document/d/1cCJjzZaJ7ATbq8N2fvhmsDOUWdm7t3uSSXv6bD0E_GM/edit#heading=h.x0pkk2mc19ey Deeks et al. (2019) heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/jnatselp10&div=5&id=&page= Minardi (2020) web.archive.org/web/20221013014526/bbc.com/future/article/20201014-totalitarian-world-in-chains-artificial-intelligenceWebb (2023) 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs-labour-marketWinick (2018) web.archive.org/web/20221016005338/technologyreview.com/2018/01/25/146020/every-study-we-could-find-on-what-automation-will-do-to-jobs-in-one-chart Dafoe (2018) 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/allan-dafoe-politics-of-ai Robins-Early (2023) theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/19/ai-generated-disinformation-us-electionsKarnofsky (2021) web.archive.org/web/20221013011707/cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-aiInternational Data Corporation (2021) web.archive.org/web/20221016011608/idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS48127321Hilton (2023) 80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-safety-researcherFenwick (2023) 80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-policy-and-strategy
Unconventional career advice to help you find a fulfilling career that does good. 80,000 Hours 2023-09-05 | ...
OpenAI’s huge push to make superintelligence safe | Jan Leike 80,000 Hours 2023-08-22 | In July 2023, OpenAI announced that it would be putting a massive 20% of its computational resources behind a new team and project, Superalignment, with the goal to figure out how to make superintelligent AI systems aligned and safe to use within four years.Today's guest Jan Leike, Head of Alignment at OpenAI, will be co-leading the project. ---------The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jan-leike-superalignment
How to make a difference with your career 80,000 Hours 2023-05-12 | Your most important ethical decision…is probably your career. The first reason for this is the huge amount of time at stake. You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. That’s more time than you’ll spend eating, socialising, and watching Netflix put together.And it means (unless you happen to be the heir to a large estate) that time is the biggest resource you have to help others.So if you can increase the overall impact of your career by just a tiny amount, it will likely do more good than changes you could make to other parts of your life.Or, to look at it another way, it’s worth thinking a lot about how to make even just small improvements to your career. For instance, if you could increase the impact of your career by 1%, it would be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how to do that.And that brings us to the second reason why your choice of career is so important: some careers give you the opportunity to do vastly more good for the world than others — to a much greater extent than people realise.In fact, we argue that some career paths open to you likely have 10 or 100 or even 1,000 times more impact than others. And this makes it even more important to think hard about your career.To find out more about ways to increase your career’s positive social impact, get our free guide here:https://80k.link/ZIM
Bear Braumoeller on how worried we should be about the risk of war 80,000 Hours 2023-02-21 | This clip is from episode 140 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline.To listen to the full episode, search 80,000 hours wherever you get your podcasts, or find the full episode and transcript on our website at: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bear-braumoeller-decline-of-warThe 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Find us on social media at:Twitter twitter.com/80000HoursInstagram instagram.com/80000.hoursTikTok tiktok.com/@80000hoursFacebook facebook.com/80000HoursLinkedin linkedin.com/company/80-000-hoursProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn’t inevitable 80,000 Hours 2023-02-20 | This clip is from episode 145 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn’t inevitable.To listen to the full episode, search 80,000 hours wherever you get your podcasts, or find the full episode and transcript on our website at: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christopher-brown-slavery-abolitionThe 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Find us on social media at:Twitter twitter.com/80000HoursInstagram instagram.com/80000.hoursTikTok tiktok.com/@80000hoursFacebook facebook.com/80000HoursLinkedin linkedin.com/company/80-000-hoursProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism 80,000 Hours 2023-02-17 | Competition in the news business creates pressure to write quick pieces on topical political issues that can drive lots of clicks with just a few hours’ work.But according to Kelsey Piper, staff writer for the new _Future Perfect_ section on Vox’s website focused on effective altruist themes, Future Perfect’s goal is to run in the opposite direction and make room for more substantive coverage that’s not tied to the news cycle._The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.__Find the full transcript and blog post associated with this episode at:_80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/kelsey-piper-important-advocacy-in-journalismProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
Glen Weyl on radical institutional reforms that make capitalism and democracy work better 80,000 Hours 2023-02-14 | Imagine you were put in charge of planning out a country’s economy – determining who should work where and what they should make – without prices. You would surely struggle to collect all the information you need about what people want and who can most efficiently make it from an office building in the capital city.Pro-market economists love to wax rhapsodic about the capacity of markets to pull together the valuable local information spread across all of society and solve this so-called ‘knowledge problem’.But when it comes to politics and voting – which also aim to aggregate the preferences and knowledge found in millions of individuals – the enthusiasm for finding clever institutional designs turns to skepticism.Today’s guest, freewheeling economist Glen Weyl, won’t have it, and is on a warpath to reform liberal democratic institutions in order to save them._The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.__Find the full transcript and blog post associated with this episode at:_80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/glen-weyl-radically-reforming-capitalism-and-democracyProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
Athena Aktipis on why elephants get deadly cancers less often than humans 80,000 Hours 2023-01-26 | This clip is from episode 144 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast – Athena Aktipis on cancer, cooperation, and the apocalypse.To listen to the full episode, search 80,000 hours wherever you get your podcasts, or find the full episode and transcript on our website at: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/athena-aktipis-cancer-cooperation-apocalypseThe 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Find us on social media at:Twitter twitter.com/80000HoursInstagram instagram.com/80000.hoursTikTok tiktok.com/@80000hoursFacebook facebook.com/80000HoursLinkedin linkedin.com/company/80-000-hoursProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
Athena Aktipis on cancer, cooperation, and the apocalypse 80,000 Hours 2023-01-25 | * * * Episode 144 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast. Subscribe, learn more or find a summary and full transcript here: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/athena-aktipis-cancer-cooperation-apocalypseWhat’s the opposite of cancer?If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer.But today’s guest Athena Aktipis says that the opposite of cancer is us: it’s having a functional multicellular body that’s cooperating effectively in order to make that multicellular body function.If, like us, you found her answer far more satisfying than the dictionary, maybe you could consider closing your dozens of merriam-webster.com tabs, and start listening to this podcast instead.As Athena explains in her book The Cheating Cell, what we see with cancer is a breakdown in each of the foundations of cooperation that allowed multicellularity to arise:* Cells will proliferate when they shouldn’t.* Cells won’t die when they should.* Cells won’t engage in the kind of division of labour that they should.* Cells won’t do the jobs that they’re supposed to do.* Cells will monopolise resources.* And cells will trash the environment.When we think about animals in the wild, or even bacteria living inside our cells, we understand that they’re facing evolutionary pressures to figure out how they can replicate more; how they can get more resources; and how they can avoid predators — like lions, or antibiotics.We don’t normally think of individual cells as acting as if they have their own interests like this. But cancer cells are actually facing similar kinds of evolutionary pressures within our bodies, with one major difference: they replicate much, much faster.Incredibly, the opportunity for evolution by natural selection to operate just over the course of cancer progression is easily faster than all of the evolutionary time that we have had as humans since Homo sapiens came about.Here’s a quote from Athena:"So you have to go and kind of put yourself on a different spatial scale and time scale, and just shift your thinking to be like: the body is a world with all these different ecosystems in it, and the cells are existing on a time scale where, if we’re going to map it onto anything like what we experience, a day is at least 10 years for them, right?So it’s a very, very different way of thinking. Then once you shift to that, you’re like, “Oh, wow, there’s so much that could be happening in terms of adaptation inside the body, how cells are actually evolving inside the body over the course of our lifetimes.” That shift just opens up all this potential for using evolutionary approaches in adaptationist thinking to generate hypotheses that then you can test."You can find compelling examples of cooperation and conflict all over the universe, so Rob and Athena don’t stop with cancer. They also discuss:* Cheating within cells themselves* Cooperation in human societies as they exist today — and perhaps in the future, between civilisations spread across different planets or stars* Whether it’s too out-there to think of humans as engaging in cancerous behaviour.* Why our anti-contagious-cancer mechanisms are so successful* Why elephants get deadly cancers less often than humans, despite having way more cells* When a cell should commit suicide* When the human body deliberately produces tumours* The strategy of deliberately not treating cancer aggressively* Superhuman cooperation* And much moreAnd at the end of the episode, they cover Athena’s new book Everything is Fine! How to Thrive in the Apocalypse, including:* Staying happy while thinking about the apocalypse* Practical steps to prepare for the apocalypse* And whether a zombie apocalypse is already happening among Tasmanian devilsGet this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app.Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Milo McGuireVideo editing: Ryan KesslerTranscriptions: Katy Moore
John McWhorter on why creole languages are fascinating 80,000 Hours 2023-01-10 | This clip is from episode 142 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction.To listen to the full episode, search 80,000 hours wherever you get your podcasts, or find the full episode and transcript on our website at: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/john-mcwhorter-language-extinctionThe 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Find us on social media at:Twitter twitter.com/80000HoursInstagram instagram.com/80000.hoursTikTok tiktok.com/@80000hoursFacebook facebook.com/80000HoursLinkedin linkedin.com/company/80-000-hoursProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction 80,000 Hours 2022-12-20 | Episode 142 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast. Subscribe, learn more or find a summary and full transcript here: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/john-mcwhorter-language-extinctionJohn McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He’s also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything and everything. On top of his academic work he’s also written 22 books, produced five online university courses, hosts one and a half podcasts, and now writes a regular New York Times op-ed column.Our show is mostly about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. But what’s the point of hosting a podcast if you can’t occasionally just talk about something fascinating with someone whose work you appreciate?So today, just before the holidays, we’re sharing this interview with John about language and linguistics — including what we think are some of the most important things everyone ought to know about those topics. We ask him:• Can you communicate faster in some languages than others, or is there some constraint that prevents that?• Does learning a second or third language make you smarter or not?• Can a language decay and get worse at communicating what people want to say?• If children aren't taught a language, how many generations does it take them to invent a fully fledged one of their own?• Did Shakespeare write in a foreign language, and if so, should we translate his plays?• How much does language really shape the way we think?• Are creoles the best languages in the world — languages that ideally we would all speak?• What would be the optimal number of languages globally?• Does trying to save dying languages do their speakers a favour, or is it more of an imposition?• Should we bother to teach foreign languages in UK and US schools?• Is it possible to save the important cultural aspects embedded in a dying language without saving the language itself?• Will AI models speak a language of their own in the future, one that humans can't understand but which better serves the tradeoffs AI models need to make?The audio version also includes a remix of the conversation with the language model ChatGPT, and a related lecture from John on linguistic relativity: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/john-mcwhorter-language-extinctionGet this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app.Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellVideo editing: Ryan KesslerTranscriptions: Katy Moore
Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age 80,000 Hours 2022-11-08 | The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Find the full transcript and blog post associated with this episode at:80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-of-the-publicFind us on social media at:Twitter twitter.com/80000HoursInstagram instagram.com/80000.hoursTikTok tiktok.com/@80000hoursFacebook facebook.com/80000HoursLinkedin linkedin.com/company/80-000-hoursProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
Alan Hájek on using expected value in everyday life 80,000 Hours 2022-11-03 | This clip is from episode 139 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value.To listen to the full episode, search 80,000 hours wherever you get your podcasts, or find the full episode and transcript on our website at: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sharon-hewitt-rawlette-hedonistic-utilitarianismThe 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Find us on social media at:Twitter twitter.com/80000HoursInstagram instagram.com/80000.hoursTikTok tiktok.com/@80000hoursFacebook facebook.com/80000HoursLinkedin linkedin.com/company/80-000-hoursProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on her theory of moral realism 80,000 Hours 2022-10-04 | This clip is from episode 138 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter.To listen to the full episode, search 80,000 hours wherever you get your podcasts, or find the full episode and transcript on our website at: 80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sharon-hewitt-rawlette-hedonistic-utilitarianismThe 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.Find us on social media at:Twitter twitter.com/80000HoursInstagram instagram.com/80000.hoursTikTok tiktok.com/@80000hoursFacebook facebook.com/80000HoursLinkedin linkedin.com/company/80-000-hoursProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore
