80,000 Hours Podcast

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 — whic...

"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 G...

"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...

"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 c...

"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...

"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...

"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 so...

"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 h...

"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...

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 t...

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...

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 . Chapters: Rob's intro (00:00:00) Introduction (00:04:08) Chapter 1: What Makes for a Dream Job? (00:09:09) Chapter 2: Can One Person Make a Difference?...

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...

"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...

"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 agr...

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 sup...

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 ou...

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 fo...

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&amp...

"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...

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 podcast@80000hours.org to help us figure out whether more of this ought to exist. Chapters: Rob’s intro (00:00:00) The Worst Ideas in the History of the...

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...

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 G...

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, foc...

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...