Podcast

#181 – Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond

By and · Published March 1st, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Laura Deming — founder of The Longevity Fund — about the challenge of ending ageing.

They cover:

  • How lifespan is surprisingly easy to manipulate in animals, which suggests human longevity could be increased too.
  • Why we irrationally accept age-related health decline as inevitable.
  • The engineering mindset Laura takes to solving the problem of ageing.
  • Laura’s thoughts on how ending ageing is primarily a social challenge, not a scientific one.
  • The recent exciting regulatory breakthrough for an anti-ageing drug for dogs.
  • Laura’s vision for how increased longevity could positively transform society by giving humans agency over when and how they age.
  • Why this decade may be the most important decade ever for making progress on anti-ageing research.
  • The beauty and fascination of biology, which makes it such a compelling field to work in.
  • And plenty more.

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

By and · Published February 21st, 2024

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 on in the world — or alternatively, extremely easy to mislead people into believing convenient lies.

But this week’s guest, cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, has a very different view on how people form beliefs and figure out who to trust — one in which misinformation really is barely a problem today, and is unlikely to be a problem anytime soon. As he explains in his book Not Born Yesterday, Hugo believes we seriously underrate the perceptiveness and judgement of ordinary people.

In this interview, host Rob Wiblin and Hugo discuss:

  • How our reasoning mechanisms evolved to facilitate beneficial communication, not blind gullibility.
  • How Hugo makes sense of our apparent gullibility in many cases — like falling for financial scams, astrology, or bogus medical treatments, and voting for policies that aren’t actually beneficial for us.
  • Rob and Hugo’s ideas about whether AI might make misinformation radically worse, and which mass persuasion approaches we should be most worried about.
  • Why Hugo thinks our intuitions about who to trust are generally quite sound, even in today’s complex information environment.
  • The distinction between intuitive beliefs that guide our actions versus reflective beliefs that don’t.
  • Why fake news and conspiracy theories actually have less impact than most people assume.
  • False beliefs that have persisted across cultures and generations — like bloodletting and vaccine hesitancy — and theories about why.
  • And plenty more.

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

By and · Published February 12th, 2024 ·

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 than the brain.

From an evolutionary perspective, that’s to be expected, right? If your heart or lungs or legs or skin stop working properly while you’re a teenager, you’re less likely to reproduce, and the genes that cause that malfunction get weeded out of the gene pool.

So why is it that these evolutionary selective pressures seemingly fixed our bodies so that they work pretty smoothly for young people most of the time, but it feels like evolution fell asleep on the job when it comes to the brain? Why did evolution never get around to patching the most basic problems, like social anxiety, panic attacks, debilitating pessimism, or inappropriate mood swings? For that matter, why did evolution go out of its way to give us the capacity for low mood or chronic anxiety or extreme mood swings at all?

Today’s guest, Randy Nesse — a leader in the field of evolutionary psychiatry — wrote the book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, in which he sets out to try to resolve this paradox.

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

By and · Published February 1st, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Emily Oster — economist at Brown University, host of the ParentData podcast, and the author of three hugely popular books that provide evidence-based insights into pregnancy and early childhood.

They cover:

  • Common pregnancy myths and advice that Emily disagrees with — and why you should probably get a doula.
  • Whether it’s fine to continue with antidepressants and coffee during pregnancy.
  • What the data says — and doesn’t say — about outcomes from parenting decisions around breastfeeding, sleep training, childcare, and more.
  • Which factors really matter for kids to thrive — and why that means parents shouldn’t sweat the small stuff.
  • How to reduce parental guilt and anxiety with facts, and reject judgemental “Mommy Wars” attitudes when making decisions that are best for your family.
  • The effects of having kids on career ambitions, pay, and productivity — and how the effects are different for men and women.
  • Practical advice around managing the tradeoffs between career and family.
  • What to consider when deciding whether and when to have kids.
  • Relationship challenges after having kids, and the protective factors that help.
  • And plenty more.

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

By and · Published January 24th, 2024 ·

Back in December, we released an episode where Rob Wiblin interviewed Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution podcast — on his takes on the pace of development of AGI and the OpenAI leadership drama, based on his experience red teaming an early version of GPT-4 and the conversations with OpenAI staff and board members that followed.

In today’s episode, their conversation continues, with Nathan diving deeper into:

  • What AI now actually can and can’t do — across language and visual models, medicine, scientific research, self-driving cars, robotics, weapons — and what the next big breakthrough might be.
  • Why most people, including most listeners, probably don’t know and can’t keep up with the new capabilities and wild results coming out across so many AI applications — and what we should do about that.
  • How we need to learn to talk about AI more productively — particularly addressing the growing chasm between those concerned about AI risks and those who want to see progress accelerate, which may be counterproductive for everyone.
  • Where Nathan agrees with and departs from the views of ‘AI scaling accelerationists.’
  • The chances that anti-regulation rhetoric from some AI entrepreneurs backfires.
  • How governments could (and already do) abuse AI tools like facial recognition, and how militarisation of AI is progressing.
  • Preparing for coming societal impacts and potential disruption from AI.
  • Practical ways that curious listeners can try to stay abreast of everything that’s going on.
  • And plenty more.

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

By and · Published December 22nd, 2023 ·

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?

That’s the central theme of today’s episode with Nathan Labenz — entrepreneur, AI scout, and host of The Cognitive Revolution podcast. 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 full-time job to understand AI capabilities across every domain. He has been obsessively tracking the AI world since — including joining OpenAI’s “red team” that probed GPT-4 to find ways it could be abused, long before it was public.

Whether OpenAI was taking AI safety seriously enough became a topic of dinner table conversation around the world after the shocking firing and reinstatement of Sam Altman as CEO last month.

Nathan’s view: it’s complicated. Discussion of this topic has often been heated, polarising, and personal. But Nathan wants to avoid that and simply lay out, in a way that is impartial and fair to everyone involved, what OpenAI has done right and how it could do better in his view.

When he started on the GPT-4 red team, the model would do anything from diagnose a skin condition to plan a terrorist attack without the slightest reservation or objection. When later shown a “Safety” version of GPT-4 that was almost the same, he approached a member of OpenAI’s board to share his concerns and tell them they really needed to try out GPT-4 for themselves and form an opinion.

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

By and · Published December 14th, 2023

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 is the situation under control? Not even close.

Around half the kids in poor and middle-income countries have blood lead levels above 5 micrograms per decilitre; the US declared a national emergency when just 5% of the children in Flint, Michigan exceeded that level. The collective damage this is doing to children’s intellectual potential, health, and life expectancy is vast — the health damage involved is around that caused by malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV combined.

This week’s guest, Lucia Coulter — cofounder of the incredibly successful Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) — speaks about how LEEP has been reducing childhood lead exposure in poor countries by getting bans on lead in paint enforced.

Various estimates suggest the work is absurdly cost effective. LEEP is in expectation preventing kids from getting lead poisoning for under $2 per child (explore the analysis here). Or, looking at it differently, LEEP is saving a year of healthy life for $14, and in the long run is increasing people’s lifetime income anywhere from $300–1,200 for each $1 it spends, by preventing intellectual stunting.

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

By and · Published December 7th, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Nita Farahany — professor of law and philosophy at Duke Law School — about applications of cutting-edge neurotechnology.

They cover:

  • How close we are to actual mind reading.
  • How hacking neural interfaces could cure depression.
  • How companies might use neural data in the workplace — like tracking how productive you are, or using your emotional states against you in negotiations.
  • How close we are to being able to unlock our phones by singing a song in our heads.
  • How neurodata has been used for interrogations, and even criminal prosecutions.
  • The possibility of linking brains to the point where you could experience exactly the same thing as another person.
  • Military applications of this tech, including the possibility of one soldier controlling swarms of drones with their mind.
  • And plenty more.

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

By , and · Published November 22nd, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Jeff Sebo — director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program at NYU — about preparing for a world with digital minds.

They cover:

  • The non-negligible chance that AI systems will be sentient by 2030
  • What AI systems might want and need, and how that might affect our moral concepts
  • What happens when beings can copy themselves? Are they one person or multiple people? Does the original own the copy or does the copy have its own rights? Do copies get the right to vote?
  • What kind of legal and political status should AI systems have? Legal personhood? Political citizenship?
  • What happens when minds can be connected? If two minds are connected, and one does something illegal, is it possible to punish one but not the other?
  • The repugnant conclusion and the rebugnant conclusion
  • The experience of trying to build the field of AI welfare
  • What improv comedy can teach us about doing good in the world
  • And plenty more.

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

By and · Published November 17th, 2023

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 understanding of the world. Far from informing us and enabling us to improve the world, consuming the news distracts us, confuses us, and leaves us feeling powerless.

In the first half of the episode, Bryan and Rob discuss various alleged problems with the news, including:

  • That it overwhelmingly provides us with information we can’t usefully act on.
  • That it’s very non-representative in what it covers, in particular favouring the negative over the positive and the new over the significant.
  • That it obscures the big picture, falling into the trap of thinking ‘something important happens every day.’
  • That it’s highly addictive, for many people chewing up 10% or more of their waking hours.
  • That regularly checking the news leaves us in a state of constant distraction and less able to engage in deep thought.
  • And plenty more.

Bryan and Rob conclude that if you want to understand the world, you’re better off blocking news websites and spending your time on Wikipedia, Our World in Data, or reading a textbook. And if you want to generate political change, stop reading about problems you already know exist and instead write your political representative a physical letter — or better yet, go meet them in person.

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

By and · Published November 9th, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews award-winning investigative journalist Alison Young on the surprising frequency of lab leaks and what needs to be done to prevent them in the future.

They cover:

  • The most egregious biosafety mistakes made by the CDC, and how Alison uncovered them through her investigative reporting
  • The Dugway life science test facility case, where live anthrax was accidentally sent to labs across the US and several other countries over a period of many years
  • The time the Soviets had a major anthrax leak, and then hid it for over a decade
  • The 1977 influenza pandemic caused by vaccine trial gone wrong in China
  • The last death from smallpox, caused not by the virus spreading in the wild, but by a lab leak in the UK
  • Ways we could get more reliable oversight and accountability for these labs
  • And the investigative work Alison’s most proud of

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

By and · Published November 1st, 2023

In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin interviews Santosh Harish — leader of Open Philanthropy’s grantmaking in South Asian air quality — about the scale of the harm caused by air pollution.

They cover:

  • How bad air pollution is for our health and life expectancy
  • The different kinds of harm that particulate pollution causes
  • The strength of the evidence that it damages our brain function and reduces our productivity
  • Whether it was a mistake to switch our attention to climate change and away from air pollution
  • Whether most listeners to this show should have an air purifier running in their house right now
  • Where air pollution in India is worst and why, and whether it’s going up or down
  • Where most air pollution comes from
  • The policy blunders that led to many sources of air pollution in India being effectively unregulated
  • Why indoor air pollution packs an enormous punch
  • The politics of air pollution in India
  • How India ended up spending a lot of money on outdoor air purifiers
  • The challenges faced by foreign philanthropists in India
  • Why Santosh has made the grants he has so far
  • And plenty more

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

By and · Published October 26th, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Paul Niehaus — cofounder of GiveDirectly — on the case for giving unconditional cash to the world’s poorest households.

They cover:

  • The empirical evidence on whether giving cash directly can drive meaningful economic growth
  • How the impacts of GiveDirectly compare to USAID employment programmes
  • GiveDirectly vs GiveWell’s top-recommended charities
  • How long-term guaranteed income affects people’s risk-taking and investments
  • Whether recipients prefer getting lump sums or monthly instalments
  • How GiveDirectly tackles cases of fraud and theft
  • The case for universal basic income, and GiveDirectly’s UBI studies in Kenya, Malawi, and Liberia
  • The political viability of UBI
  • Plenty more

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

By and · Published October 23rd, 2023

In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks with repeat guest Ian Morris about what big-picture history says about the likely impact of machine intelligence.

They cover:

  • Some crazy anomalies in the historical record of civilisational progress
  • Whether we should think about today’s technology from an evolutionary perspective
  • Whether war will make a resurgence
  • Why we can’t end up living like The Jetsons
  • Whether stagnation or cyclical futures are realistic
  • What it means that over the very long term the rate of economic growth has increased
  • Whether violence between humans and powerful AI systems is likely
  • The most likely reasons for Rob and Ian to be really wrong about all of this
  • How professional historians react to this sort of talk
  • The future of Ian’s work
  • Plenty more

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

By and · Published October 18th, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Seren Kell — Senior Science and Technology Manager at the Good Food Institute Europe — about making alternative proteins as tasty, cheap, and convenient as traditional meat, dairy, and egg products.

They cover:

  • The basic case for alternative proteins, and why they’re so hard to make
  • Why fermentation is a surprisingly promising technology for creating delicious alternative proteins
  • The main scientific challenges that need to be solved to make fermentation even more useful
  • The progress that’s been made on the cultivated meat front, and what it will take to make cultivated meat affordable
  • How GFI Europe is helping with some of these challenges
  • How people can use their careers to contribute to replacing factory farming with alternative proteins
  • The best part of Seren’s job
  • Plenty more

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

By and · Published October 12th, 2023

In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin gets the rare chance to interview someone with insider AI policy experience at the White House and DeepMind who’s willing to speak openly — Tantum Collins.

They cover:

  • How AI could strengthen government capacity, and how that’s a double-edged sword
  • How new technologies force us to confront tradeoffs in political philosophy that we were previously able to pretend weren’t there
  • To what extent policymakers take different threats from AI seriously
  • Whether the US and China are in an AI arms race or not
  • Whether it’s OK to transform the world without much of the world agreeing to it
  • The tyranny of small differences in AI policy
  • Disagreements between different schools of thought in AI policy, and proposals that could unite them
  • How the US AI Bill of Rights could be improved
  • Whether AI will transform the labour market, and whether it will become a partisan political issue
  • The tensions between the cultures of San Francisco and DC, and how to bridge the divide between them
  • What listeners might be able to do to help with this whole mess
  • Panpsychism
  • Plenty more

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

By and · Published October 6th, 2023

In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks with repeat guest and audience favourite Anders Sandberg about the most impressive things that could be achieved in our universe given the laws of physics.

They cover:

  • The epic new book Anders is working on, and whether he’ll ever finish it
  • Whether there’s a best possible world or we can just keep improving forever
  • What wars might look like if the galaxy is mostly settled
  • The impediments to AI or humans making it to other stars
  • How the universe will end a million trillion years in the future
  • Whether it’s useful to wonder about whether we’re living in a simulation
  • The grabby aliens theory
  • Whether civilizations get more likely to fail the older they get
  • The best way to generate energy that could ever exist
  • Black hole bombs
  • Whether superintelligence is necessary to get a lot of value
  • The likelihood that life from elsewhere has already visited Earth
  • And plenty more.

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

By and · Published October 2nd, 2023

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Kevin Esvelt — a biologist at the MIT Media Lab and the inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive — about the threat posed by engineered bioweapons.

They cover:

  • Why it makes sense to focus on deliberately released pandemics
  • Case studies of people who actually wanted to kill billions of humans
  • How many people have the technical ability to produce dangerous viruses
  • The different threats of stealth and wildfire pandemics that could crash civilisation
  • The potential for AI models to increase access to dangerous pathogens
  • Why scientists try to identify new pandemic-capable pathogens, and the case against that research
  • Technological solutions, including UV lights and advanced PPE
  • Using CRISPR-based gene drive to fight diseases and reduce animal suffering
  • And plenty more.

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

By and · Published September 8th, 2023

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 happy with a more modest and manageable goal: “doing most of the good that we can.”

Toby was inspired to revisit these ideas by the possibility that Sam Bankman-Fried, who stands accused of committing severe fraud as CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was motivated to break the law by a desire to give away as much money as possible to worthy causes.

Toby’s top reason not to fully maximise is the following: if the goal you’re aiming at is subtly wrong or incomplete, then going all the way towards maximising it will usually cause you to start doing some very harmful things.

This result can be shown mathematically, but can also be made intuitive, and may explain why we feel instinctively wary of going “all-in” on any idea, or goal, or way of living — even something as benign as helping other people as much as possible.

Toby gives the example of someone pursuing a career as a professional swimmer. Initially, as our swimmer takes their training and performance more seriously, they adjust their diet, hire a better trainer, and pay more attention to their technique. While swimming is the main focus of their life, they feel fit and healthy and also enjoy other aspects of their life as well — family, friends, and personal projects.

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

By and · Published September 1st, 2023 ·

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). The future could be really good, but only if we grab the bull by the horns and solve the new problems technology is throwing at us.

On Mustafa’s telling, AI and biotechnology will soon be a huge aid to criminals and terrorists, empowering small groups to cause harm on previously unimaginable scales. Democratic countries have learned to walk a ‘narrow path’ between chaos on the one hand and authoritarianism on the other, avoiding the downsides that come from both extreme openness and extreme closure. AI could easily destabilise that present equilibrium, throwing us off dangerously in either direction. And ultimately, within our lifetimes humans may not need to work to live any more — or indeed, even have the option to do so.

And those are just three of the challenges confronting us. In Mustafa’s view, ‘misaligned’ AI that goes rogue and pursues its own agenda won’t be an issue for the next few years, and it isn’t a problem for the current style of large language models. But he thinks that at some point — in eight, ten, or twelve years — it will become an entirely legitimate concern, and says that we need to be planning ahead.

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