Future of Life Institute Podcast

Updated: 28 Mar 2025 • 228 episodes
www.futureoflife.org

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit working to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies. In particular, FLI focuses on risks from artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, nuclear weapons and climate change. The Institute's work is made up of three main strands: grantmaking for risk reduction, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, US government and European Union institutions. FLI has become one of the world's leading voices on the governance of AI having created one of the earliest and most influential sets of governance principles: the Asilomar AI Principles.

Categories:

Show episodes

On this episode, Ege Erdil from Epoch AI joins me to discuss their new GATE model of AI development, what evolution and brain efficiency tell us about AGI requirements, how AI might impact wages and labor markets, and what it takes to train models with long-term planning. Toward the end, we dig into Moravec’s Paradox,

94 min
00:00
01:34:33
No file found

In this special episode, we feature Nathan Labenz interviewing Nicholas Carlini on the Cognitive Revolution podcast. Nicholas Carlini works as a security researcher at Google DeepMind, and has published extensively on adversarial machine learning and cybersecurity. Carlini discusses his pioneering work on adversarial a

143 min
00:00
02:23:12
No file found

On this episode, I interview Anthony Aguirre, Executive Director of the Future of Life Institute, about his new essay Keep the Future Human: https://keepthefuturehuman.ai    AI companies are explicitly working toward AGI and are likely to succeed soon, possibly within years. Keep the Future Human explains how unchecked

81 min
00:00
01:21:03
No file found

On this episode, physicist and hedge fund manager Samir Varma joins me to discuss whether AIs could have free will (and what that means), the emerging field of AI psychology, and which concepts they might rely on. We discuss whether collaboration and trade with AIs are possible, the role of AI in finance and biology, a

76 min
00:00
01:16:15
No file found

On this episode, Jeffrey Ladish from Palisade Research joins me to discuss the rapid pace of AI progress and the risks of losing control over powerful systems. We explore why AIs can be both smart and dumb, the challenges of creating honest AIs, and scenarios where AI could turn against us.    We also touch upon Palisa

82 min
00:00
01:22:33
No file found

Ann Pace joins the podcast to discuss the work of Wise Ancestors. We explore how biobanking could help humanity recover from global catastrophes, how to conduct decentralized science, and how to collaborate with local communities on conservation efforts.    You can learn more about Ann's work here:    https://www.wisea

46 min
00:00
46:09
No file found