Podcasts · Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

The most important century (with Holden Karnofsky)

27 Aug 2025 · 1 h 48 min · Explicit

Episode The most important century (with Holden Karnofsky)

0:00 1:48:10

Read the full transcript here.

Has society reached ‘peak progress’? Can we sustain the level of economic growth that technology has enabled over the last century? Have researchers plucked the last of science's "low-hanging fruit?" Why did early science innovators have outsized impact per capita? As fields mature, why does per-researcher output fall? Can a swarm of AI systems materially accelerate research? What does exponential growth hide about the risk of collapse? Will specialized AI outcompete human polymaths? Is quality of life still improving - and how confident are we in those measures? Is it too late to steer away from the attention economy? Can our control over intelligent systems scale as we develop their power? Will AI ever be capable of truly understanding human values? And if we reach that point, will it choose to align itself?

Holden Karnofsky is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he focuses on the design of the company's Responsible Scaling Policy and other aspects of preparing for the possibility of highly advanced AI systems in the future. Prior to his work with Anthropic, Holden led several high-impact organizations as the co-founder and co-executive director of charity evaluator GiveWell, and one of three Managing Directors of grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy. You can read more about ideas that matter to Holden at his blog Cold Takes.