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Show Notes

Jaan Tallinn, investor, programmer, and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, joins us to discuss his perspective on AI, synthetic biology, unknown unknows, and what's needed for mitigating existential risk in the 21st century.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

• Intelligence and coordination
• Existential risk from AI, synthetic biology, and unknown unknowns
• AI adoption as a delegation process
• Jaan's investments and philanthropic efforts
• International coordination and incentive structures
• The short-term and long-term AI safety communities

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:29 How can humanity improve?

3:10 The importance of intelligence and coordination

8:30 The bottlenecks of input and output bandwidth as well as processing speed between AIs and humans

15:20 Making the creation of AI feel dangerous and how the nuclear power industry killed itself by downplaying risks

17:15 How Jaan evaluates and thinks about existential risk

18:30 Nuclear weapons as the first existential risk we faced

20:47 The likelihood of unknown unknown existential risks

25:04 Why Jaan doesn't see nuclear war as an existential risk

27:54 Climate change

29:00 Existential risk from synthetic biology

31:29 Learning from mistakes, lacking foresight, and the importance of generational knowledge

36:23 AI adoption as a delegation process

42:52 Attractors in the design space of AI

44:24 The regulation of AI

45:31 Jaan's investments and philanthropy in AI

55:18 International coordination issues from AI adoption as a delegation process

57:29 AI today and the negative impacts of recommender algorithms

1:02:43 Collective, institutional, and interpersonal coordination

1:05:23 The benefits and risks of longevity research

1:08:29 The long-term and short-term AI safety communities and their relationship with one another

1:12:35 Jaan's current philanthropic efforts

1:16:28 Software as a philanthropic target

1:19:03 How do we move towards beneficial futures with AI?

1:22:30 An idea Jaan finds meaningful

1:23:33 Final thoughts from Jaan

1:25:27 Where to find Jaan

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