Future of Life Institute Podcast
The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit working to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies. In particular, FLI focuses on risks from artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, nuclear weapons and climate change. The Institute's work is made up of three main strands: grantmaking for risk reduction, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, US government and European Union institutions. FLI has become one of the world's leading voices on the governance of AI having created one of the earliest and most influential sets of governance principles: the Asilomar AI Principles.
Episodes
April 19, 2024 • 86 mins
Liron Shapira joins the podcast to discuss superintelligence goals, what makes AI different from other technologies, risks from centralizing power, and whether AI can defend us from AI.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intelligence as optimization-power
05:18 Will LLMs imitate human values?
07:15 Why would AI develop dangerous goals?
09:55 Goal-completeness
12:53 Alignment to which values?
22:12 Is AI just another technology?
31:20 What is...
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April 5, 2024 • 86 mins
Annie Jacobsen joins the podcast to lay out a second by second timeline for how nuclear war could happen. We also discuss time pressure, submarines, interceptor missiles, cyberattacks, and concentration of power. You can find more on Annie's work at https://anniejacobsen.com
Timestamps:
00:00 A scenario of nuclear war
06:56 Who would launch an attack?
13:50 Detecting nuclear attacks
19:37 The first critical seconds
29:42 Decis...
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March 14, 2024 • 68 mins
Katja Grace joins the podcast to discuss the largest survey of AI researchers conducted to date, AI researchers' beliefs about different AI risks, capabilities required for continued AI-related transformation, the idea of discontinuous progress, the impacts of AI from either side of the human-level intelligence threshold, intelligence and power, and her thoughts on how we can mitigate AI risk. Find more on Katja's work at https://a...
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February 29, 2024 • 96 mins
Holly Elmore joins the podcast to discuss pausing frontier AI, hardware overhang, safety research during a pause, the social dynamics of AI risk, and what prevents AGI corporations from collaborating. You can read more about Holly's work at https://pauseai.info
Timestamps:
00:00 Pausing AI
10:23 Risks during an AI pause
19:41 Hardware overhang
29:04 Technological progress
37:00 Safety research during a pause
54:42 Social dynami...
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February 16, 2024 • 57 mins
Sneha Revanur joins the podcast to discuss the social effects of AI, the illusory divide between AI ethics and AI safety, the importance of humans in the loop, the different effects of AI on younger and older people, and the importance of AIs identifying as AIs. You can read more about Sneha's work at https://encodejustice.org
Timestamps:
00:00 Encode Justice
06:11 AI ethics and AI safety
15:49 Humans in the loop
23:59 AI in s...
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February 2, 2024 • 91 mins
Roman Yampolskiy joins the podcast again to discuss whether AI is like a Shoggoth, whether scaling laws will hold for more agent-like AIs, evidence that AI is uncontrollable, and whether designing human-like AI would be safer than the current development path. You can read more about Roman's work at http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/
Timestamps:
00:00 Is AI like a Shoggoth?
09:50 Scaling laws
16:41 Are humans more general than AIs?...
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January 19, 2024 • 47 mins
On this special episode of the podcast, Flo Crivello talks with Nathan Labenz about AI as a new form of life, whether attempts to regulate AI risks regulatory capture, how a GPU kill switch could work, and why Flo expects AGI in 2-8 years.
Timestamps:
00:00 Technological progress
07:59 Regulatory capture and AI
11:53 AI as a new form of life
15:44 Can AI development be paused?
20:12 Biden's executive order on AI
22:54 How woul...
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January 6, 2024 • 99 mins
Carl Robichaud joins the podcast to discuss the new nuclear arms race, how much world leaders and ideologies matter for nuclear risk, and how to reach a stable, low-risk era. You can learn more about Carl's work here: https://www.longview.org/about/carl-robichaud/
Timestamps:
00:00 A new nuclear arms race
08:07 How much do world leaders matter?
18:04 How much does ideology matter?
22:14 Do nuclear weapons cause stable peace?
31:...
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December 14, 2023 • 102 mins
Frank Sauer joins the podcast to discuss autonomy in weapon systems, killer drones, low-tech defenses against drones, the flaws and unpredictability of autonomous weapon systems, and the political possibilities of regulating such systems. You can learn more about Frank's work here: https://metis.unibw.de/en/
Timestamps:
00:00 Autonomy in weapon systems
12:19 Balance of offense and defense
20:05 Killer drone systems
28:53 Is auto...
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December 1, 2023 • 100 mins
Darren McKee joins the podcast to discuss how AI might be difficult to control, which goals and traits AI systems will develop, and whether there's a unified solution to AI alignment.
Timestamps:
00:00 Uncontrollable superintelligence
16:41 AI goals and the "virus analogy"
28:36 Speed of AI cognition
39:25 Narrow AI and autonomy
52:23 Reliability of current and future AI
1:02:33 Planning for multiple AI scenarios
1:18:57 Will...
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November 17, 2023 • 108 mins
Mark Brakel (Director of Policy at the Future of Life Institute) joins the podcast to discuss the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, objections to AI policy, AI regulation in the EU and US, global institutions for safe AI, and autonomy in weapon systems.
Timestamps:
00:00 AI Safety Summit in the UK
12:18 Are officials up to date on AI?
23:22 Objections to AI policy
31:27 The EU AI Act
43:37 The right level of regulation
57:...
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November 3, 2023 • 127 mins
Dan Hendrycks joins the podcast again to discuss X.ai, how AI risk thinking has evolved, malicious use of AI, AI race dynamics between companies and between militaries, making AI organizations safer, and how representation engineering could help us understand AI traits like deception. You can learn more about Dan's work at https://www.safe.ai
Timestamps:
00:00 X.ai - Elon Musk's new AI venture
02:41 How AI risk thinking has evolv...
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October 20, 2023 • 134 mins
Samuel Hammond joins the podcast to discuss how AGI will transform economies, governments, institutions, and other power structures. You can read Samuel's blog at https://www.secondbest.ca
Timestamps:
00:00 Is AGI close?
06:56 Compute versus data
09:59 Information theory
20:36 Universality of learning
24:53 Hards steps in evolution
30:30 Governments and advanced AI
40:33 How will AI transform the economy?
55:26 How will AI ...
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October 17, 2023 • 59 mins
Are we doomed to a future of loneliness and unfulfilling online interactions? What if technology made us feel more connected instead?
Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year
In the e...
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October 10, 2023 • 50 mins
Let’s imagine a future where AGI is developed but kept at a distance from practically impacting the world, while narrow AI remakes the world completely. Most people don’t know or care about the difference and have no idea how they could distinguish between a human or artificial stranger. Inequality sticks around and AI fractures society into separate media bubbles with irreconcilable perspectives. But it's not all bad. AI markedly ...
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October 5, 2023 • 122 mins
Steve Omohundro joins the podcast to discuss Provably Safe Systems, a paper he co-authored with FLI President Max Tegmark. You can read the paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.01933.pdf
Timestamps:
00:00 Provably safe AI systems
12:17 Alignment and evaluations
21:08 Proofs about language model behavior
27:11 Can we formalize safety?
30:29 Provable contracts
43:13 Digital replicas of actual systems
46:32 Proof-carrying code...
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October 3, 2023 • 64 mins
What if AI allowed us to communicate with animals? Could interspecies communication lead to new levels of empathy? How might communicating with animals lead humans to reimagine our place in the natural world?
Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that w...
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September 26, 2023 • 58 mins
If you could extend your life, would you? How might life extension technologies create new social and political divides? How can the world unite to solve the great problems of our time, like AI risk? What if AI creators could agree on an inspection process to expose AI dangers before they're unleashed?
Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life...
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September 21, 2023 • 100 mins
Johannes Ackva joins the podcast to discuss the main drivers of climate change and our best technological and governmental options for managing it. You can read more about Johannes' work at http://founderspledge.com/climate
Timestamps:
00:00 Johannes's journey as an environmentalist
13:21 The drivers of climate change
23:00 Oil, coal, and gas
38:05 Solar, wind, and hydro
49:34 Nuclear energy
57:03 Geothermal energy
1:00:41 Mos...
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September 19, 2023 • 55 mins
How do low income countries affected by climate change imagine their futures? How do they overcome these twin challenges? Will all nations eventually choose or be forced to go digital?
Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of th...
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