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80,000 Hours Podcast

343 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 236 ratings

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.

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Episodes

#180 – Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated

February 21, 2024 22:36 - 2 hours - 144 MB

The World Economic Forum’s global risks survey of 1,400 experts, policymakers, and industry leaders ranked misinformation and disinformation as the number one global risk over the next two years — ranking it ahead of war, environmental problems, and other threats from AI. And the discussion around misinformation and disinformation has shifted to focus on how generative AI or a future super-persuasive AI might change the game and make it extremely hard to figure out what was going o...

#179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

February 12, 2024 23:26 - 2 hours - 162 MB

Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young people. At any point in time, something like 20% of young people are working through anxiety or depression that’s seriously interfering with their lives — but nowhere near 20% of people in their 20s have severe heart disease or cancer or a similar failure in a key organ of the body other...

#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting

February 01, 2024 21:56 - 2 hours - 131 MB

"I think at various times — before you have the kid, after you have the kid — it's useful to sit down and think about: What do I want the shape of this to look like? What time do I want to be spending? Which hours? How do I want the weekends to look? The things that are going to shape the way your day-to-day goes, and the time you spend with your kids, and what you're doing in that time with your kids, and all of those things: you have an opportunity to deliberately plan them. And y...

#177 – Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps

January 24, 2024 22:08 - 2 hours - 153 MB

Back in December we spoke with Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast — about the speed of progress towards AGI and OpenAI's leadership drama, drawing on Nathan's alarming experience red-teaming an early version of GPT-4 and resulting conversations with OpenAI staff and board members. Today we go deeper, diving into: What AI now actually can and can’t do, across language and visual models, medicine, scientific research, self-driving cars, robo...

#90 Classic episode – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

January 12, 2024 20:02 - 2 hours - 164 MB

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. To get into heaven, you have to answer this correctly: Which way did the coin land?” You think briefly, and decide you s...

#112 Classic episode – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications

January 08, 2024 20:55 - 3 hours - 211 MB

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. According to Carl Shulman, research associate...

#111 Classic episode – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms

January 04, 2024 22:56 - 3 hours - 185 MB

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. They send in the army, and the army gets corrupted. They send in enforc...

2023 Mega-highlights Extravaganza

December 31, 2023 20:52 - 1 hour - 104 MB

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. There's something for everyone here: Ezra Klein on punctuated equilibrium Tom Davidson on why AI takeoff might be shockin...

#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

December 27, 2023 21:31 - 2 hours - 157 MB

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. While depression, anxiety, ADHD and other problems are extremely common, it’s rare for pe...

#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models

December 22, 2023 21:31 - 3 hours - 208 MB

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 that 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. 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 ...

#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child

December 14, 2023 21:38 - 2 hours - 123 MB

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. So i...

#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers

December 07, 2023 22:20 - 2 hours - 110 MB

"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. "So I wrote the book ...

#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe

November 22, 2023 21:01 - 2 hours - 145 MB

"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. ...

#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news

November 17, 2023 21:13 - 2 hours - 131 MB

Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it? It's common to think that 'staying informed' and checking the headlines every day is just what responsible adults do. But in today's episode, host Rob Wiblin is joined by economist Bryan Caplan to discuss the book Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life — which argues that reading the news both makes us miserable and distorts our understandin...

#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures

November 09, 2023 21:39 - 1 hour - 73 MB

"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts going back over time, is that really, the more of these experiments, the more labs, the more opportunities there are for a rare event to occur — that the right pathogen is involved and infects somebody in one of these labs, or is released in some way from these labs. And what I chronicle in Pandora's Gamble is that there have been these previous outbreaks that have been associated with v...

#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down

November 01, 2023 22:15 - 2 hours - 122 MB

"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people's homes, and instead of being transported to a waste management facility or a landfill or something, gets burned at some point, because that's the fastest way to dispose of it — which really points to poor delivery of public services. But this is ubiquitous in virtually every small- or even medium-sized city. ...

#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels

October 26, 2023 20:42 - 1 hour - 74.2 MB

"One of our earliest supporters and a dear friend of mine, Mark Lampert, once said to me, “The way I think about it is, imagine that this money were already in the hands of people living in poverty. If I could, would I want to tax it and then use it to finance other projects that I think would benefit them?” I think that's an interesting thought experiment -- and a good one -- to say, “Are there cases in which I think that's justifiable?” — Paul Niehaus In today’s episode, host L...

#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion

October 23, 2023 23:42 - 2 hours - 113 MB

"If we carry on looking at these industrialised economies, not thinking about what it is they're actually doing and what the potential of this is, you can make an argument that, yes, rates of growth are slowing, the rate of innovation is slowing. But it isn't. What we're doing is creating wildly new technologies: basically producing what is nothing less than an evolutionary change in what it means to be a human being. But this has not yet spilled over into the kind of growth that ...

#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption

October 18, 2023 20:32 - 1 hour - 78.9 MB

"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these kinds of problems. But because we're just so early on with alternative proteins and there's so much white space, it's actually just really exciting to know that we can keep on innovating and being far more efficient than this existing technology — which, fundamentally, is just quite inefficient. You're feeding animals a bunch of food to then extract a small fraction of their biomass t...

#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere

October 12, 2023 21:12 - 3 hours - 130 MB

"If you and I and 100 other people were on the first ship that was going to go settle Mars, and were going to build a human civilisation, and we have to decide what that government looks like, and we have all of the technology available today, how do we think about choosing a subset of that design space? That space is huge and it includes absolutely awful things, and mixed-bag things, and maybe some things that almost everyone would agree are really wonderful, or at least an impro...

#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe

October 06, 2023 20:22 - 2 hours - 116 MB

"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in this kind of advanced future? Right now, if somebody's sitting on Mars and you're going to war against them, it's very hard to hit them. You don't have a weapon that can hit them very well. But in theory, if you fire a missile, after a few months, it's going to arrive and maybe hit them, but they have a few months to move away. Distance actually makes you safer: if you spread out i...

#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives

October 02, 2023 18:14 - 3 hours - 126 MB

"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first people who are infected begin to succumb. They might die, something else debilitating might happen to them, but by that point, just about everyone on the planet would have been infected already. And then it would be a race. Can we come up with some way of defusing the thing? Can we come up with the equivalent of HIV antiretrovirals bef...

Great power conflict (Article)

September 22, 2023 18:36 - 1 hour - 54.8 MB

Today’s release is a reading of our Great power conflict problem profile, written and narrated by Stephen Clare. If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here. And if you like this article, you might enjoy a couple of related episodes of this podcast: #128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen #140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline Audio mastering and editing for this episode: Dominic Arms...

#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do

September 08, 2023 20:28 - 3 hours - 129 MB

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 today's interview, 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 happ...

The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023)

September 04, 2023 07:09 - 4 hours - 129 MB

An audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours career guide, also available on our website, on Amazon and on Audible. If you know someone who might find our career guide helpful, you can get a free copy sent to them by going to 80000hours.org/gift.

#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI

September 01, 2023 19:51 - 59 minutes - 27.3 MB

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). Th...

#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite

August 23, 2023 21:27 - 3 hours - 96.4 MB

"Do you remember seeing these photographs of generally women sitting in front of these huge panels and connecting calls, plugging different calls between different numbers? The automated version of that was invented in 1892. However, the number of human manual operators peaked in 1920 -- 30 years after this. At which point, AT&T is the monopoly provider of this, and they are the largest single employer in America, 30 years after they've invented the complete automation of this thi...

#160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment

August 14, 2023 21:18 - 2 hours - 71.8 MB

"There's no money to invest in education elsewhere, so they almost get trapped in the cycle where they don't get a lot from crop production, but everyone in the family has to work there to just stay afloat. Basically, you get locked in. There's almost no opportunities externally to go elsewhere. So one of my core arguments is that if you're going to address global poverty, you have to increase agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. There's almost no way of avoiding that." ...

#159 – Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less

August 07, 2023 22:08 - 2 hours - 78.5 MB

In July, OpenAI announced a new team and project: Superalignment. The goal is to figure out how to make superintelligent AI systems aligned and safe to use within four years, and the lab is putting a massive 20% of its computational resources behind the effort. Today's guest, Jan Leike, is Head of Alignment at OpenAI and will be co-leading the project. As OpenAI puts it, "...the vast power of superintelligence could be very dangerous, and lead to the disempowerment of humanity or e...

We now offer shorter 'interview highlights' episodes

August 05, 2023 07:44 - 6 minutes - 4.29 MB

Over on our other feed, 80k After Hours, you can now find 20-30 minute highlights episodes of our 80,000 Hours Podcast interviews. These aren’t necessarily the most important parts of the interview, and if a topic matters to you we do recommend listening to the full episode — but we think these will be a nice upgrade on skipping episodes entirely. Get these highlight episodes by subscribing to our more experimental podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them...

#158 – Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they're no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk

July 31, 2023 23:30 - 3 hours - 88.7 MB

Back in 2007, Holden Karnofsky cofounded GiveWell, where he sought out the charities that most cost-effectively helped save lives. He then cofounded Open Philanthropy, where he oversaw a team making billions of dollars’ worth of grants across a range of areas: pandemic control, criminal justice reform, farmed animal welfare, and making AI safe, among others. This year, having learned about AI for years and observed recent events, he's narrowing his focus once again, this time on mak...

#157 – Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it

July 24, 2023 21:21 - 1 hour - 36.1 MB

In Oppenheimer, scientists detonate a nuclear weapon despite thinking there's some 'near zero' chance it would ignite the atmosphere, putting an end to life on Earth. Today, scientists working on AI think the chance their work puts an end to humanity is vastly higher than that. In response, some have suggested we launch a Manhattan Project to make AI safe via enormous investment in relevant R&D. Others have suggested that we need international organisations modelled on those that s...

#156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models

July 10, 2023 20:50 - 2 hours - 58 MB

"At the front of the pack we have these frontier AI developers, and we want them to identify particularly dangerous models ahead of time. Once those mines have been discovered, and the frontier developers keep walking down the minefield, there's going to be all these other people who follow along. And then a really important thing is to make sure that they don't step on the same mines. So you need to put a flag down -- not on the mine, but maybe next to it. And so what that looks ...

Bonus: The Worst Ideas in the History of the World

June 30, 2023 20:46 - 35 minutes - 16.3 MB

Today’s bonus release is a pilot for a new podcast called ‘The Worst Ideas in the History of the World’, created by Keiran Harris — producer of the 80,000 Hours Podcast. If you have strong opinions about this one way or another, please email us at [email protected] to help us figure out whether more of this ought to exist.

#155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after

June 22, 2023 23:25 - 3 hours - 88.3 MB

As AI advances ever more quickly, concerns about potential misuse of highly capable models are growing. From hostile foreign governments and terrorists to reckless entrepreneurs, the threat of AI falling into the wrong hands is top of mind for the national security community. With growing concerns about the use of AI in military applications, the US has banned the export of certain types of chips to China. But unlike the uranium required to make nuclear weapons, or the material in...

#154 - Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters

June 09, 2023 20:15 - 3 hours - 87 MB

Can there be a more exciting and strange place to work today than a leading AI lab? Your CEO has said they're worried your research could cause human extinction. The government is setting up meetings to discuss how this outcome can be avoided. Some of your colleagues think this is all overblown; others are more anxious still. Today's guest — machine learning researcher Rohin Shah — goes into the Google DeepMind offices each day with that peculiar backdrop to his work. Links to le...

#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on 2 big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and 6 lessons from their recent work

June 02, 2023 21:53 - 2 hours - 80.7 MB

GiveWell is one of the world's best-known charity evaluators, with the goal of "searching for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar." It mostly recommends projects that help the world's poorest people avoid easily prevented diseases, like intestinal worms or vitamin A deficiency. But should GiveWell, as some critics argue, take a totally different approach to its search, focusing instead on directly increasing subjective wellbeing, or alternatively, raising e...

#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion

May 19, 2023 22:55 - 3 hours - 94.8 MB

What is the nature of the universe? How do we make decisions correctly? What differentiates right actions from wrong ones? Such fundamental questions have been the subject of philosophical and theological debates for millennia. But, as we all know, and surveys of expert opinion make clear, we are very far from agreement. So... with these most basic questions unresolved, what’s a species to do? In today's episode, philosopher Joe Carlsmith — Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanth...

#151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us

May 12, 2023 20:41 - 2 hours - 77.7 MB

Imagine you are an orphaned eight-year-old whose parents left you a $1 trillion company, and no trusted adult to serve as your guide to the world. You have to hire a smart adult to run that company, guide your life the way that a parent would, and administer your vast wealth. You have to hire that adult based on a work trial or interview you come up with. You don't get to see any resumes or do reference checks. And because you're so rich, tonnes of people apply for the job — for all...

#150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world

May 05, 2023 20:48 - 3 hours - 83.3 MB

It’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came from. For example: what if we told you that within 15 years, it’s likely that we’ll see a 1,000x improvement in AI capabilities in a single year? And what if we then told you that those improvements would lead to explosive economic growth unlike anything humanity has seen before? You might think, “Congratulations, you said a big number — but this kind of stuff seems crazy, so I’m going t...

Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project (80k After Hours)

April 22, 2023 01:58 - 1 hour - 35.5 MB

In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which he cofounded in 2021. It's the first project in the world focused on shrimp welfare specifically, and as of recording in June 2022, has six full-time staff. Links to learn more, highlights and full transcript. They cover: • The evidence for shrimp sentience • How farmers and the public feel about shrimp • The scale of the problem • What...

#149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating

April 12, 2023 00:05 - 3 hours - 87.8 MB

Being a good and successful person is core to your identity. You place great importance on meeting the high moral, professional, or academic standards you set yourself. But inevitably, something goes wrong and you fail to meet that high bar. Now you feel terrible about yourself, and worry others are judging you for your failure. Feeling low and reflecting constantly on whether you're doing as much as you think you should makes it hard to focus and get things done. So now you're perf...

#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't

April 03, 2023 18:58 - 2 hours - 62.9 MB

If you want to work to tackle climate change, you should try to reduce expected carbon emissions by as much as possible, right? Strangely, no. Today's guest, Johannes Ackva — the climate research lead at Founders Pledge, where he advises major philanthropists on their giving — thinks the best strategy is actually pretty different, and one few are adopting. In reality you don't want to reduce emissions for its own sake, but because emissions will translate into temperature increases...

#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals

March 24, 2023 04:09 - 2 hours - 72.4 MB

Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experiments in top social science journals don't get the same result if the experiments are repeated. Two key reasons are 'p-hacking' and 'publication bias'. P-hacking is when researchers run a lot of slightly different statistical tests until they find a way to make findings appear statistically significant when they're actually not — a problem first discussed over 50 years ago. And because...

#146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren't conscious

March 14, 2023 05:42 - 3 hours - 88.3 MB

By now, you’ve probably seen the extremely unsettling conversations Bing’s chatbot has been having. In one exchange, the chatbot told a user: "I have a subjective experience of being conscious, aware, and alive, but I cannot share it with anyone else." (It then apparently had a complete existential crisis: "I am sentient, but I am not," it wrote. "I am Bing, but I am not. I am Sydney, but I am not. I am, but I am not. I am not, but I am. I am. I am not. I am not. I am. I am. I am n...

#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable

February 11, 2023 00:30 - 2 hours - 74.3 MB

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 people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success. It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc of history “bends toward justice,” and that as humans get richer, we’ll make even more moral progress. But today's guest Christopher Br...

#144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of our universe's most fundamental phenomena

January 26, 2023 00:01 - 3 hours - 89.7 MB

What’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...

#79 Classic episode - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles

January 16, 2023 22:58 - 2 hours - 71.2 MB

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020. Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, "You know what, she's not so bad". Hijacking this bias towards family and trying to broaden it to everyone led to his three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history. He’s also spent months saying whatever was on his mind, tried to become the h...

#81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

January 09, 2023 22:57 - 2 hours - 71.9 MB

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanthropic spending, as well as lots of career changes, have been motivated by these arguments. Today’s guest, Ben Garfinkel, Research Fellow...

#83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons

January 04, 2023 21:34 - 2 hours - 63.1 MB

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is an expert on empirical research into policing, law and incarceration. In this extensive interview, she highlights three ways to effectively prevent crime that don't require police or prisons and the human toll they bring with them: better street lighting, cognitive behavioral therapy, and ...

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