Brian Toon joins us to discuss the risk of nuclear winter. Learn more about Brian's work: https://lasp.colorado.edu/home/people/brian-toon/ Read Brian's publications: https://airbornescience.nasa.gov/person/Brian_Toon Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:02 Asteroid impacts 04:20 The discovery of nuclear winter 13:56 Comparing volcanoes and asteroids to nuclear weapons 19:42 How did life survive the asteroid impact 65 million years ago? 25:05 How humanity could go extinct 29:46 Nuclear weapons as a great filter 34:32 Nuclear winter and food production 40:58 The psychology of nuclear threat 43:56 Geoengineering to prevent nuclear winter 46:49 Will humanity avoid nuclear winter?
Researcher Oly Sourbut discusses how AI tools might strengthen human reasoning, from fact-checking and scenario planning to honest AI standards and better coordination, and explores how to keep humans central while building trustworthy, society-wide sensemaking.
Technical specialist Nora Ammann of the UK's ARIA discusses how to steer a slow AI takeoff toward resilient, cooperative futures, covering risks from rogue AI and competition to scalable oversight, formal guarantees, secure infrastructure, and AI-supported bargaining.
Maya Ackerman discusses human and machine creativity, exploring its definition, how AI alignment impacts it, and the role of hallucination. The conversation also covers strategies for human-AI collaboration.
