Kyle Fish on the most bizarre findings from 5 AI welfare experiments
What happens when you lock two AI systems in a room together and tell them they can discuss anything they want?| 80,000 Hours
What happens when you lock two AI systems in a room together and tell them they can discuss anything they want?| 80,000 Hours
Bestselling author Brian Christian on what CS can and can't teach us about when to quit your job, when to marry, the best way to sell your house, and more.| 80,000 Hours
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.| 80,000 Hours
Ryan Greenblatt — lead author on the explosive paper “Alignment faking in large language models” and chief scientist at Redwood Research — thinks there’s a 25% chance that within four years, AI will be able to do everything needed to run an AI company, from writing code to designing experiments to making strategic and business decisions.| 80,000 Hours
It’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came from.| 80,000 Hours
"The core argument is very simple. One, future people matter morally. Two, there could be enormous numbers of future people. And three, that we can make a difference to the world they inhabit. So we really can make a difference to all of those lives that may be lived."| 80,000 Hours
Throughout history, technological revolutions have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in society. The Industrial Revolution created conditions where democracies could dominate for the first time — as nations needed educated, informed, and empowered citizens to deploy advanced technologies and remain competitive.| 80,000 Hours
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.| 80,000 Hours
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.| 80,000 Hours
COVID-19 is a vivid reminder that we are underprepared to deal with biological threats.| 80,000 Hours
Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who don’t want houses, offices, power stations, trains, subway stations (or whatever) built in their area can usually find some way to block them, even if the benefits to society outweigh the costs 10 or 100 times over.| 80,000 Hours
The three biggest AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — have now all released policies designed to make their AI models less likely to go rogue or cause catastrophic damage as they approach, and eventually exceed, human capabilities. Are they good enough?| 80,000 Hours
In 2014 Taiwan was rocked by mass protests against a proposed trade agreement with China that was about to be agreed to without the usual Parliamentary hearings. Students invaded and took over the Parliament. But rather than chant slogans, instead they livestreamed their own parliamentary debate over the trade deal, allowing volunteers to speak both in favour and against.| 80,000 Hours
Transcript| 80,000 Hours
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 them in either order!| 80,000 Hours
Quantum mechanics — our best theory of atoms, molecules, and the subatomic particles that make them up — underpins most of modern physics. But there are varying interpretations of what it means, all of them controversial in their own way.| 80,000 Hours
Transcript| 80,000 Hours
Transcript| 80,000 Hours
Oxford philosophy Prof Will MacAskill points out that Kant was one of the earliest proponents for democracy - but he also thought that women had no place in civil society...| 80,000 Hours
Transcript| 80,000 Hours
Transcript| 80,000 Hours
"If your goal is to maximize the expected value of the impact that you have... it implies interesting things about how you should behave."| 80,000 Hours
If you want to make the world a better place, would it be better to help your niece with her SATs, or try to join the State Department to lower the risk that the US and China go to war?| 80,000 Hours
While reading I copied out 87 surprising facts in the book. Here's a sample of 16…| 80,000 Hours
Transcript| 80,000 Hours
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.| 80,000 Hours
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?| 80,000 Hours
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.| 80,000 Hours
Imagine that you’re in the hospital for surgery. This kind of procedure is always safe, and always successful — but it can take anywhere from one to ten hours. You can’t be knocked out for the operation, but because it’s so painful — you’ll be given a drug that makes you forget the experience.| 80,000 Hours
"...it doesn't look like things have been normal for a long time... we just live on this rocket ship that took off 5 seconds ago, and nobody knows where it's going."| 80,000 Hours
Animals roar and bare their teeth to intimidate adversaries — but one side usually backs down, and real fights are rare. The wisdom of evolution is that the risk of violence is just too great...| 80,000 Hours
