On this episode, I interview Anthony Aguirre, Executive Director of the Future of Life Institute, about his new essay Keep the Future Human

AI companies are explicitly working toward AGI and are likely to succeed soon, possibly within years. Keep the Future Human explains how unchecked development of smarter-than-human, autonomous, general-purpose AI systems will almost inevitably lead to human replacement. But it doesn't have to. Learn how we can keep the future human and experience the extraordinary benefits of Tool AI...

Timestamps:

00:00 What situation is humanity in?

05:00 Why AI progress is fast

09:56 Tool AI instead of AGI

15:56 The incentives of AI companies

19:13 Governments can coordinate a slowdown

25:20 The need for international coordination

31:59 Monitoring training runs

39:10 Do reasoning models undermine compute governance?

49:09 Why isn't alignment enough?

59:42 How do we decide if we want AGI?

01:02:18 Disagreement about AI

01:11:12 The early days of AI risk