80k After Hours

For decades, US allies have slept soundly under the protection of America’s overwhelming military might. Donald Trump — with his threats to ditch NATO, seize Greenland, and abandon Taiwan — seems hell-bent on shattering that comfort.

But according to Hugh White — one of the world's leading strategic thinkers, emeritus professor at the Australian National University, and author of Hard New World: Our Post-American Future — Trump isn't destroying American hegemony. He's simply revealing that it's already gone.

These highlights are from episode #218 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Hugh White on why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that’s probably good, and include:

• America has been all talk, no action when it comes to China and Russia (00:39)
• How Trump has significantly brought forward the inevitable (05:14)
• Westerners always underestimate what China can achieve (10:32)
• We live in a multipolar world; we've got to make a multipolar world work (15:47)
• Trump is half-right that the US was being ripped off (19:06)
• Europe is strong enough to take on Russia, except it lacks nuclear deterrence (22:27)
• A multipolar world is bad, but better than the alternative: nuclear war (28:50)
• Taiwan's position is essentially indefensible — and the rest of the world needs to be honest with them about that (33:24)
• AGI may or may not overcome existing nuclear deterrence (39:16)

These aren't necessarily the most important or even most entertaining parts of the interview — so if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode!

And if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing [email protected].

Highlights put together by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

AI models today have a 50% chance of successfully completing a task that would take an expert human one hour. Seven months ago, that number was roughly 30 minutes — and seven months before that, 15 minutes.

These are substantial, multi-step tasks requiring sustained focus: building web applications, conducting machine learning research, or solving complex programming challenges.

Today’s guest, Beth Barnes, is CEO of METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) — the leading organisation measuring these capabilities.

These highlights are from episode #217 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Beth Barnes on the most important graph in AI right now — and the 7-month rule that governs its progress, and include:

• Can we see AI scheming in the chain of thought? (00:00:34)
• We have to test model honesty even before they're used inside AI companies (00:05:48)
• It's essential to thoroughly test relevant real-world tasks (00:10:13)
• Recursively self-improving AI might even be here in two years — which is alarming (00:16:09)
• Do we need external auditors doing AI safety tests, not just the companies themselves? (00:21:55)
• A case against safety-focused people working at frontier AI companies (00:29:30)
• Open-weighting models is often good, and Beth has changed her attitude about it (00:34:57)

These aren't necessarily the most important or even most entertaining parts of the interview — so if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode!

And if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing [email protected].

Highlights put together by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

When you have a system where ministers almost never understand their portfolios, civil servants change jobs every few months, and MPs don’t grasp parliamentary procedure even after decades in office — is the problem the people, or the structure they work in?

Political journalist Ian Dunt studies the systemic reasons governments succeed and fail. And in his book How Westminster Works …and Why It Doesn’t, he argues that Britain’s government dysfunction and multi-decade failure to solve its key problems stems primarily from bad incentives and bad processes.

These highlights are from episode #216 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Ian Dunt on why governments in Britain and elsewhere can’t get anything done – and how to fix it, and include:

• Rob's intro (00:00:00)
• The UK is governed from a tiny cramped house (00:00:08)
• Replacing political distractions with departmental organisation (00:02:58)
• The profoundly dangerous development of "delegated legislation" (00:06:42)
• Do more independent-minded legislatures actually lead to better outcomes? (00:09:08)
• MPs waste much of their time helping constituents with random complaints (00:12:50)
• How to keep expert civil servants (00:15:44)
• Unlikely heroes in the House of Lords (00:18:33)
• Proportional representation and other alternatives to first-past-the-post (00:22:02)

These aren't necessarily the most important or even most entertaining parts of the interview — so if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode!

And if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing [email protected].

Highlights put together by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

Throughout history, technological revolutions have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in society. The Industrial Revolution created conditions where democracies could dominate for the first time — as nations needed educated, informed, and empowered citizens to deploy advanced technologies and remain competitive.

Unfortunately, there’s every reason to think artificial general intelligence (AGI) will reverse that trend.

In a new paper, Tom Davidson — senior research fellow at the Forethought Centre for AI Strategy — argues that advanced AI systems will enable unprecedented power grabs by tiny groups of people, primarily by removing the need for other human beings to participate.

These highlights are from episode #215 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Tom Davidson on how AI-enabled coups could allow a tiny group to seize power, and include:

• "No person rules alone" — except now they might (00:00:13)
• The 3 threat scenarios (00:06:17)
• Underpinning all 3 threats: Secret AI loyalties (00:10:15)
• Is this common sense or far-fetched? (00:13:46)
• How to automate a military coup (00:17:41)
• If you took over the US, could you take over the whole world? (00:22:44)
• Secret loyalties all the way down (00:26:27)
• Is it important to have more than one powerful AI country? (00:29:59)
• What transparency actually looks like (00:33:08)

These aren't necessarily the most important or even most entertaining parts of the interview — so if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode!

And if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing [email protected].

Highlights put together by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

Most AI safety conversations centre on alignment: ensuring AI systems share our values and goals. But despite progress, we’re unlikely to know we’ve solved the problem before the arrival of human-level and superhuman systems in as little as three years.

So some — including Buck Shlegeris, CEO of Redwood Research — are developing a backup plan to safely deploy models we fear are actively scheming to harm us: so-called “AI control.” While this may sound mad, given the reluctance of AI companies to delay deploying anything they train, not developing such techniques is probably even crazier.

These highlights are from episode #214 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Buck Shlegeris on controlling AI that wants to take over – so we can use it anyway, and include:

• What is AI control? (00:00:15)
• One way to catch AIs that are up to no good (00:07:00)
• What do we do once we catch a model trying to escape? (00:13:39)
• Team Human vs Team AI (00:18:24)
• If an AI escapes, is it likely to be able to beat humanity from there? (00:24:59)
• Is alignment still useful? (00:32:10)
• Could 10 safety-focused people in an AGI company do anything useful? (00:35:34)

These aren't necessarily the most important or even most entertaining parts of the interview — so if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode!

And if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing [email protected].

Highlights put together by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

Watch this episode on YouTube! https://youtu.be/fJssGodnCQg

Conor and Arden sit down with Matt in his farewell episode to discuss the law, their team retreat, his lessons learned from 80k, and the fate of the show.

The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic engineering, the Big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, birth control, and more. Now imagine all of it compressed into just 10 years.

That’s the future Will MacAskill — philosopher and researcher at the Forethought Centre for AI Strategy — argues we need to prepare for in his new paper “Preparing for the intelligence explosion.” Not in the distant future, but probably in three to seven years.

These highlights are from episode #213 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” — and how we’re completely unprepared, and include:

• Rob's intro (00:00:00)
• A century of history crammed into a decade (00:00:17)
• What does a good future with AGI even look like? (00:04:48)
• AI takeover might happen anyway — should we rush to load in our values? (00:09:29)
• Lock-in is plausible where it never was before (00:14:40)
• ML researchers are feverishly working to destroy their own power (00:20:07)
• People distrust utopianism for good reason (00:24:30)
• Non-technological disruption (00:29:18)
• The 3 intelligence explosions (00:31:10)

These aren't necessarily the most important or even most entertaining parts of the interview — so if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode!

And if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing [email protected]. 

Highlights put together by Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through. That’s how Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capability becomes available, societies that adopt it tend to outcompete those that don’t. Those who resist too much can find themselves taken over or rendered irrelevant.

These highlights are from episode #212 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway, and include:

• Who's Allan Dafoe? (00:00:00)
• Astounding patterns in macrohistory (00:00:23)
• Are humans just along for the ride when it comes to technological progress? (00:03:58)
• Flavours of technological determinism (00:07:11)
• The super-cooperative AGI hypothesis and backdoors (00:12:50)
• Could having more cooperative AIs backfire? (00:19:16)
• The offence-defence balance (00:24:23)

These aren't necessarily the most important or even most entertaining parts of the interview — so if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode!

And if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing [email protected]. 

Highlights put together by Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

Watch this episode on YouTube! https://youtu.be/IRRwHCK279E

Matt, Bella, and Huon sit down with Chi Nguyen to discuss cooperating with aliens, elections of future past, and Bad Billionaires pt. 2.

Check out: 

• Matt’s summer appearance on the BBC on funding for the arts
• Chi’s ECL Explainer (get in touch to support!)

Economist and editor of Works in Progress Sam Bowman isn’t content to just condemn the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) mentality behind rich countries' construction stagnation. He wants to actually get a tonne of stuff built, and by that standard the strategy of attacking ‘NIMBYs’ has been an abject failure. They are too politically powerful, and if you try to crush them, sooner or later they crush you.

So Sam lays out three alternative strategies in our full interview with him — including highlights like:

• Rich countries have a crisis of underconstruction (00:00:19)
• The UK builds shockingly little because of its planning permission system (00:04:57)
• Overcoming NIMBYism means fixing incentives (00:07:21)
• NIMBYs aren't wrong: they are often harmed by development (00:10:44)
• Street votes give existing residents a say (00:16:29)
• It's essential to define in advance who gets a say (00:24:37)
• Property tax distribution might be the most important policy you've never heard of (00:28:55)
• Using aesthetics to get buy-in for new construction (00:35:48)
• Locals actually really like having nuclear power plants nearby (00:44:14)
• It can be really useful to let old and new institutions coexist for a while (00:48:27)
• Ozempic and living in the decade that we conquered obesity (00:53:05)
• Northern latitudes still need nuclear power (00:55:30)

These highlights are from episode #211 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Sam Bowman on why housing still isn’t fixed and what would actually work. These aren't necessarily the most important, or even most entertaining parts of the interview — so if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode!

And if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing [email protected]. (And you may have noticed this episode is longer than most of our highlights episodes — let us know if you liked that or not!)

Highlights put together by Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong