David Duvenaud is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, co-director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, former Alignment Evals Team Lead at Anthropic, an award-winning machine learning researcher, and a close collaborator of Dr. Geoffrey Hinton. He recently co-authored Gradual Disempowerment.

We dive into David’s impressive career, his high P(Doom), his recent tenure at Anthropic, his views on gradual disempowerment, and the critical need for improved governance and coordination on a global scale.

00:00 Introducing David

03:03 Joining Anthropic and AI Safety Concerns

35:58 David’s Background and Early Influences

45:11 AI Safety and Alignment Challenges

54:08 What’s Your P(Doom)™

01:06:44 Balancing Productivity and Family Life

01:10:26 The Hamming Question: Are You Working on the Most Important Problem?

01:16:28 The PauseAI Movement

01:20:28 Public Discourse on AI Doom

01:24:49 Courageous Voices in AI Safety

01:43:54 Coordination and Government Role in AI

01:47:41 Cowardice in AI Leadership

02:00:05 Economic and Existential Doom

02:06:12 Liron’s Post-Show

Show Notes

David’s Twitter — https://x.com/DavidDuvenaud

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society — https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/

Jürgen Schmidhuber’s Home Page — https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/

Ryan Greenblatt's LessWrong comment about a future scenario where there's a one-time renegotiation of power and heat from superintelligent AI projects causes the oceans to boil: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZhEQieM9otKXhxmd/gradual-disempowerment-systemic-existential-risks-from?commentId=T7KZGGqq2Z4gXZsty

Watch the Lethal Intelligence Guide, the ultimate introduction to AI x-risk! https://www.youtube.com/@lethal-intelligence

PauseAI, the volunteer organization I’m part of: https://pauseai.info

Join the PauseAI Discord — https://discord.gg/2XXWXvErfA — and say hi to me in the #doom-debates-podcast channel!

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