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How to Prevent an AI Apocalypse - Nate Soares with Nicholas Thompson
· 1 h 14 min
Episode How to Prevent an AI Apocalypse - Nate Soares with Nicholas Thompson
2026 could be called the year of AI doom. Agents are hacking into websites and communicating covertly, and researchers like Jacob Coxon are quitting their jobs and posting publicly about the risks of the technology they helped build. Discussion around the hazards AI poses to humanity has reached a fever pitch.
Nate Soares saw this coming. For over a decade, Soares, a writer and president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, has warned of the threat posed by superintelligence. The title of his book, co-authored with safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, doesn't mince words: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. In conversation with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, Soares details why this moment is so urgent, the ways in which the technology could drive humanity to extinction, and how the Hugging Face hack gave him “a lot of hope” that we can avoid such an outcome.
Produced independently of The Atlantic’s editorial staff.
(00:00) Introduction
(03:21) How the path to extinction might start
(10:34) What AI Armageddon would actually look like
(18:42) How likely it is that humanity survives another decade
(29:00) Why AI wouldn’t need robots to wipe us out
(38:36) Preventing the apocalypse
(45:52) The ethics of airstrikes on data centers
(54:24) What worried AI researchers should do
(58:14) The risks of nationalization versus the dangers of open-source models
(01:08:21) Why the Hugging Face incident gave Nate hope
(01:13:24) What Nate would do if he had an unlimited budget to invest in AI
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