275 - Nate Soares: AI Will Kill Us All If We Don’t Change Course

About this episode

Nate Soares discusses the dangers of AI and the importance of AI alignment for human survival.

Nate Soares is the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and plays a central role in setting MIRI’s vision and strategy. Soares has been working in the field for over a decade, and is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, including foundational work on value learning, decision theory, and power-seeking incentives in smarter-than-human AIs. Prior to MIRI, Soares worked as an engineer at Google and Microsoft, as a research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and as a contractor for the US Department of Defense. In this episode, Nate and Robinson discuss the problems of AI from the ground up. They touch on how AI is trained, why it will surpass human intelligence, why this is dangerous, how it could wipe out humankind, and more. Nate’s recent book, co-written with Eliezer Yudkowsky, is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (Little, Brown and Company, 2025). If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies Nate’s X: https://x.com/So8res MIRI: https://intelligence.org OUTLINE 00:00 Nate’s Existential Dread 07:11 What’s the REAL Problem with Artificial Intelligence? 11:39 How Is AI Trained? 17:15 The Vital…

People in this episode

Host: Robinson Erhardt

Guest: Nate Soares

Topics covered

• AI alignment
• human intelligence
• existential risk
• AI training
• value learning
• decision theory

Keywords

• AI
• alignment problem
• intelligence
• existential risk
• training
• value learning
• decision theory
• power-seeking incentives

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Google, Microsoft, National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Department of Defense

Books & works: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

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