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Making Sense with Sam Harris

#467 — EA, AI, and the End of Work

3/30/202630 min

Sam Harris speaks with William MacAskill about effective altruism, AI, and the future of humanity. They discuss the post-FTX recovery of the EA movement, global health and pandemic preparedness, the limits of quantifiable ethics, the intelligence explosion, risks of concentrated AI power, what a post-scarcity world might look like, and other topics.

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Clips

Countering Aid Cynicism Head-On
Factory Farming’s Moral Catastrophe
Sam’s Shrimp And Backlash Worry
Defending Moral Weirdos
AI Progress On A Clock
The Scary Feedback Loop
Pandemic Fixes We Ignored
Beyond Reducing Suffering
Lab Leaks Are Not Rare
EA Giving Surges Post-FTX

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Sam Harris· Host0:00

    [gentle music] Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Will MacAskill, thanks for joining me again on the podcast.

  2. William MacAskill· Guest0:39

    It's great to be back on.

  3. Sam Harris· Host0:40

    Yeah, I don't know how many times this is, but it's many.

  4. William MacAskill· Guest0:42

    Uh, yeah. I think this is maybe number four on the main podcast.

  5. Sam Harris· Host0:45

    Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, um, you are, uh, my go-to guy on, uh, so many ethical questions, but, uh, effective altruism being the, the frame under which we think about these things. You, you, you have a, um, the tenth anniversary of your book, Doing Good Better, has just come upon us. Is there, there's a new edition?

  6. William MacAskill· Guest1:01

    That's right.

  7. Sam Harris· Host1:02

    Coming out?

  8. William MacAskill· Guest1:02

    Yeah.

  9. Sam Harris· Host1:02

    Yeah. And you, so what's changed about the actual text?

  10. William MacAskill· Guest1:06

    Uh, so in the text, the statistics have updated, and there's a new forward, which is, uh, responding to some objections and reflecting a little bit on the last ten years- Right ... growth in some of these ideas.

  11. Sam Harris· Host1:17

    Well, the ten, last ten years have been eventful for EA. What's, uh, I, I think our, the last time we spoke, we, we dealt with much of the controversy around- Mm ... Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX and, um, all of that brain damage. Is there more to say about that? I mean, what, how,

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