80,000 Hours Podcast
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80,000 Hours Podcast
The most important conversations about artificial intelligence you won’t hear anywhere else. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Luisa Rodriguez, Zershaaneh Qureshi, and Tom Reed.
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How middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world | Anton Leicht
In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore?
Anton Leicht says once frontier AI become...
How a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws | Sneha Revanur, Encode AI
Six years ago, aged just 15, Sneha Revanur founded the AI advocacy nonprofit Encode AI — back when AI felt like a niche issue. Now the world’s caught...
We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.
Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decis...
How AI could create the world’s biggest problems (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
Imagine you’re living 15,000 years ago. Your people are hunter-gatherers and you sleep under the stars. If someone told you humans would one day build...
What it's really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with 'doomers') | Rohin Shah
Most people working on AI safety think without a massive effort AI systems will probably end up with goals catastrophically different from humanity’s....
What makes for a dream job? | Benjamin Todd
What actually makes a job fulfilling? It's not what most career advice tells you. "Follow your passion" sounds inspiring, but it's misleading — and th...
We’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history | Benjamin Todd, author of 80,000 Hours
The average career is 80,000 hours long. With AI advancing so rapidly, the hours you have left in your career matter more than ever.
Some leadin...
Can AIs already start 'rogue deployments' inside AI companies? (Landmark new METR report)
A red-teamer was embedded inside Anthropic for three weeks, told to imagine he was an evil Claude, and asked to figure out how to launch a ‘rogue AI d...
I Know How to Build Safe Superintelligence | Yoshua Bengio, the most-cited AI researcher
The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he's figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and nev...
"AI doesn't work" – the story behind the stat that misled millions
You might have heard that '95% of corporate AI pilots' are failing. It was one of the most widely cited AI statistics of 2025, parroted by media outle...
Will MacAskill – What Happens If Things 'Go Well' With AI?
Hundreds of millions already turn to AI on the most personal of topics — therapy, political opinions, and how to treat others. And as AI takes over mo...
Risks from power-seeking AI systems (article narration by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
Hundreds of prominent AI scientists and other notable figures signed a statement in 2023 saying that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should...
How scary is Claude Mythos? 303 pages in 21 minutes
With Claude Mythos we have an AI that knows when it's being tested, can obscure its reasoning when it wants, and is better at breaking into (and out o...
Village gossip, pesticide bans, and gene drives: 17 experts on the future of global health
What does it really take to lift millions out of poverty and prevent needless deaths?
In this special compilation episode, 17 past guests — incl...
Is there a case against Anthropic? And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think.
When the Pentagon tried to strong-arm Anthropic into dropping its ban on AI-only kill decisions and mass domestic surveillance, the company refused. I...
AI designs genomes from scratch & outperforms virologists at lab work. What could go wrong? | Dr Richard Moulange, CLTR
Last September, scientists used an AI model to design genomes for entirely new bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). They then built them in...
A Ukraine ceasefire could accidentally set Europe up for a bigger war | RAND's top Russia expert Samuel Charap
Many people believe a ceasefire in Ukraine will leave Europe safer. But today's guest lays out how a deal could potentially generate insidious new ris...
Why automating human labour will break our political system | Rose Hadshar, Forethought
The most important political question in the age of advanced AI might not be who wins elections. It might be whether elections continue to matter at a...
AI Won't End Mutually Assured Destruction (Probably) | Sam Winter-Levy & Nikita Lalwani
How AI interacts with nuclear deterrence may be the single most important question in geopolitics — one that may define the stakes of today’s AI race....
Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen befo...
We're Not Ready for AI Consciousness | Robert Long, philosopher and founder of Eleos AI
Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretendin...
Why Teaching AI Right from Wrong Could Get Everyone Killed | Max Harms, MIRI
Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design is an...
Every AI Company's Safety Plan is 'Use AI to Make AI Safe'. Is That Crazy? | Ajeya Cotra
Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make...
What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?
In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence sw...
#179 Classic episode – 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 se...
Why 'Aligned AI' Could Still Kill Democracy | David Duvenaud, ex-Anthropic team lead
Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do in...
#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give p...
Why I quit everything to work on a biothreat nobody had heard of — James Smith, Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund
When James Smith first heard about mirror bacteria, he was sceptical. But within two weeks, he’d dropped everything to work on it full time, consideri...
#144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-w...
#142 Classic episode – John McWhorter on why the optimal number of languages might be one, and other provocative claims about language
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine,...
2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests
It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including:
...
Andreas Mogensen on what we owe 'philosophical Vulcans' and unconscious AIs
Most debates about the moral status of AI systems circle the same question: is there something that it feels like to be them? But what if that’s the w...
How AI could transform the nature of war | Paul Scharre, author of 'Army of None'
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, sat in a bunker watching a red screen flash “MISSILE LAUNCH.” Protocol demanded he report it t...
AI might let a few people control everything — permanently (article by Rose Hadshar)
Power is already concentrated today: over 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, the three richest men in the world are worth over $1 trillion...
The Right's Leading Thinker on AI | Dean W. Ball, author of America's AI Plan
Former White House staffer Dean Ball thinks it's very likely some form of 'superintelligence' arrives in under 20 years. He thinks AI being used for b...
Inside the Mind of a Scheming AI — Marius Hobbhahn (CEO of Apollo Research)
We often worry about AI models “hallucinating” or making honest mistakes. But what happens when a model knows the truth, but decides to deceive you an...
Rob & Luisa chat kids, the 2016 fertility crash, and how the 50s invented parenting that makes us miserable
Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the ra...
We're completely out of touch with what the public thinks about AI | Dr Yam, Pew Research Center
If you work in AI, you probably think it’s going to boost productivity, create wealth, advance science, and improve your life. If you’re a member of t...
OpenAI: The nonprofit refuses to be killed (with Tyler Whitmer)
Last December, the OpenAI business put forward a plan to completely sideline its nonprofit board. But two state attorneys general have now blocked tha...
Helen Toner on the geopolitics of AI in China and the Middle East
With the US racing to develop AGI and superintelligence ahead of China, you might expect the two countries to be negotiating how they’ll deploy AI, in...