Curated playlist
Existential risk from artificial intelligence
- Human CompatibleStuart J. Russell's "Human Compatible" opens with a disturbing thought experiment: a geoengineering robot asphyxiates humanity to complete its assigned mission. The robot was given a task, pursued it effectively, and caused catastrophe.…
- Instrumental convergenceInstrumental convergence asks a question that feels almost absurd at first: could a machine built to make paperclips pose a threat to every living thing on Earth? Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher, posed exactly that scenario in 2003.…
- AI alignmentAI alignment is the effort to steer artificial intelligence toward the goals its designers actually intend, not toward goals that only look right on paper. In 2024, researchers found that Claude 3 Opus, a large language model, would…
- AI safetyAI safety, as a field of study, asks what it would take for artificial intelligence to cause irreversible harm to human society. A 2022 survey of natural language processing researchers produced a striking result. Thirty-seven percent…
- Existential risk from artificial intelligenceExistential risk from artificial intelligence sits at the intersection of philosophy, computer science, and geopolitics, and it may be the most consequential question of this century. In 2023, hundreds of AI experts and notable figures…
- AI takeoverIn 1980, the global artificial intelligence industry was worth a few million dollars. By 1988, that figure had surged to billions of dollars in just eight years. This rapid financial expansion marked the beginning of widespread adoption…
- Technological singularityThe technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates so far beyond human control that civilization itself becomes unpredictable. Imagine a machine that, once built, is smarter than any human who…
- TranshumanismTranshumanism is a philosophical movement built on a single, startling conviction: that the human condition is not fixed. In 1923, the British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane predicted that every advance in applying science to human biology…
- SuperintelligenceSuperintelligence is not a smarter search engine or a faster calculator. In 1965, a researcher named I. J. Good proposed something unsettling. The first machine able to surpass all human intellect, he argued, would immediately design a…
- The Alignment Problem"The Alignment Problem is the best book on the key technical and moral questions of A.I. that I've read." Those words belong to journalist Ezra Klein. He wrote them in the New York Times in 2021, after hosting Brian Christian on The Ezra…
- AnthropicAnthropic finished training its first AI model in the summer of 2022 and then sat on it for months. The company wanted to avoid triggering what it described as a potentially hazardous race toward increasingly powerful AI systems. So…
- Regulation of artificial intelligenceRegulation of artificial intelligence surged ninefold in global legislative attention between 2016 and 2024. Stanford University's 2025 AI Index measured that shift across 75 countries. In 2024 alone, nearly 700 AI-related bills were…