What happens when the people building artificial intelligence quietly believe it might destroy us?

On this episode of Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Gregory Warner, Peabody Award–winning journalist, former NPR correspondent, and host of the hit AI podcast The Last Invention.

Gregory Warner is a versatile journalist and podcaster. He has been recognized with a Peabody Award and other awards from organizations like Edward R. Murrow, New York Festivals, AP, and PRNDI. Warner's career includes serving as an East Africa correspondent, where he covered the region's economic growth and terrorism threats. He has also worked as a senior reporter for American Public Media's Marketplace, focusing on the economics of American health care. His work has been recognized with a Best News Feature award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Gregory sits down with Geoff for an honest conversation about the AI race unfolding today. After years spent interviewing the architects, skeptics, and true believers behind advanced AI systems, Gregory has come away with an unsettling insight: the same people racing to build more powerful models are often the most worried about where this technology is heading. This episode explores whether we’re already living inside the AI risk window, why AI safety may be even harder than nuclear safety, and why Silicon Valley’s “move fast and fix later” mindset may not apply to superintelligence. It also examines the growing philosophical divide between AI doomers and AI accelerationists. This conversation goes far beyond chatbots and job-loss headlines. It asks a deeper question few are willing to confront: are we building something we can’t control and, doing it anyway?

In this video:

00:00 Intro

03:00 AI models that already behave like elite hackers

05:00 Why the AI risk window may already be open

06:30 What AI safety actually means (and why it’s so hard)

12:00 Human-in-the-loop: safety feature or illusion?

15:00 AI as an alien intelligence, not a human one

19:00 The Silicon Valley AI arms race explained

21:00 OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI: who’s racing and why

25:00 The “Compressed Century” and radical AI optimism

27:00 Can AI actually solve humanity’s biggest problems?

33:00 Capital, competition, and the pressure to deploy

37:00 Is AI more dangerous than nuclear weapons?

39:00 The problem with comparing AI to past technologies

43:00 What happens to human agency in an AI-driven world?

45:00 How AI reshapes creativity, journalism, and truth

53:00 The quiet assumptions built into AI systems

55:00 Why optimism and fear both miss the full picture

59:00 What responsibility do users have?

01:01:00 The most important question we’re not asking about AI

Connect with Gregory:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/radiogrego/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radiogrego/

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