About this episode

Dr. Stephen Casper discusses the potential risks of powerful AI and advocates for regulation and taxes on AI development.

Stephen Casper, PhD, is an incoming tenure-track professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prof. Casper is relatively unworried about the threat of human extinction from rogue superintelligence, but he is concerned about a handful of companies wielding extremely powerful AI and enfeebling the public. That’s why he’s an AI governance hawk who advocates for taxes and regulation to keep frontier labs in check. We agree that slowing down AI development would make the world safer. But you know his position is unique when he says he’d prefer to have less research on AI alignment! Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:50 — Introducing Stephen “Cas” Casper 00:04:21 — Cas’s MIT Research: Model Tampering Attacks 00:07:14 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™ 00:08:34 — Why a 5–10% P(Doom) Feels Patronizing 00:13:07 — Crux: “The Intelligence Ceiling Might Not Be That High” 00:17:18 — Power Structures vs. the Shortcut-Finding AI 00:26:03 — Thought Experiment: A Data Center From the Year 2126 00:28:25 — Is a Data Center as Dangerous as a Nuke? 00:33:41 — Cas’s Mainline Scenario: Slow-Burn Gradual Disempowerment 00:40:49 — A Multipolar Powder Keg: 10 Companies, Thousands of Open Models…

People in this episode

Host: Liron Shapira

Guest: Stephen Casper

Topics covered

• AI alignment
• AI governance
• public policy
• human extinction
• technology regulation

Keywords

• AI alignment
• human extinction
• AI governance
• Harvard
• technology regulation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard Kennedy School

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