No democracy has ever incarcerated as many people as the United States. To get its incarceration rate down to the global average, the US would have to release 3 in 4 people in its prisons today. The effects on Black Americans have been especially severe — Black people make up 12% of the US population but 33% of its prison population. In the early 2000's when incarceration reached its peak, the US government estimated that 32% of Black boys would go to prison at some point in their lives, 5.5 tim...
Jul 27, 2020•1 hr 28 min
80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanthropic spending, as well as lots of career changes, have been motivated by these arguments. Today’s guest, Ben Garfinkel, Research Fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, supports the continued expansion of...
Jul 09, 2020•2 hr 38 min
This is the fourth release in our new series of audio articles. If you want to read the original article or check out the links within it, you can find them here . "We’ve found that readers sometimes interpret or apply our advice in ways we didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t exactly recommend. That’s hard to avoid when you’re writing for a range of people with different personalities and initial views. To help get on the same page, here’s some advice about our advice, for those about to launch into ...
Jun 29, 2020•15 min
Stuart Russell, Professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the most popular AI textbook , thinks the way we approach machine learning today is fundamentally flawed. In his new book, Human Compatible , he outlines the 'standard model' of AI development, in which intelligence is measured as the ability to achieve some definite, completely-known objective that we've stated explicitly. This is so obvious it almost doesn't even seem like a design choice, but it is. Unfortunately there's a big problem ...
Jun 22, 2020•2 hr 13 min
Today we’re launching the final entry of our ‘anonymous answers' series on the website. It features answers to 23 different questions including “How have you seen talented people fail in their work?” and “What’s one way to be successful you don’t think people talk about enough?” , from anonymous people whose work we admire. We thought a lot of the responses were really interesting; some were provocative, others just surprising. And as intended, they span a very wide range of opinions. So we deci...
Jun 05, 2020•37 min
Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, "You know what? She's not so bad." Hijacking this bias towards family and trying to broaden it to everyone led to his three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history . He’s also spent months saying whatever was on his mind, tried to become the healthiest person in the world, read 33,000 pages of facts, spent a year follow...
Jun 01, 2020•2 hr 39 min
Companies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did in 2012 and algorithmic innovations have also made them 25 times more efficient at the same tasks. These are the headline results of two recent papers — AI and Compute and AI and Efficiency — from the Foresight Team at OpenAI. In today's episode I spoke with one of the authors, Danny Hernandez, who joined OpenAI after helping develop better forecasting methods at Twitch and Open Philanthropy . Dan...
May 22, 2020•2 hr 12 min
In March Professor Marc Lipsitch — Director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics — abruptly found himself a global celebrity, his social media following growing 40-fold and journalists knocking down his door, as everyone turned to him for information they could trust. Here he lays out where the fight against COVID-19 stands today, why he's open to deliberately giving people COVID-19 to speed up vaccine development, and how we could do better next time. As Marc tells us, island n...
May 18, 2020•1 hr 37 min
Today’s release is the second experiment in making audio versions of our articles. The first was a narration of Greg Lewis’ terrific problem profile on ‘Reducing global catastrophic biological risks’, which you can find on the podcast feed just before episode #74 - that is, our interview with Greg about the piece. If you want to check out the links in today’s article, you can find those here . And if you have feedback on these, positive or negative, it’d be great if you could email us at podcast...
May 12, 2020•27 min
Amid a rising COVID-19 death toll, and looming economic disaster, we’ve been looking for good news — and one thing we're especially thankful for is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS). CHS focuses on protecting us from major biological, chemical or nuclear disasters, through research that informs governments around the world. While this pandemic surprised many, just last October the Center ran a simulation of a 'new coronavirus' scenario to identify weaknesses in our ability to qu...
May 08, 2020•1 hr 53 min
Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on their most plausible paths, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths. I (Michelle Hutchinson) joined the team a couple of years ago after working at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute , and these days I'm 80,000 Hours' Head of Advising. ...
Apr 28, 2020•2 hr 13 min
Our lives currently revolve around the global emergency of COVID-19; you’re probably reading this while confined to your house, as the death toll from the worst pandemic since 1918 continues to rise. The question of how to tackle COVID-19 has been foremost in the minds of many, including here at 80,000 Hours . Today's guest, Dr Gregory Lewis, acting head of the Biosecurity Research Group at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, puts the crisis in context, explaining how COVID-19 comp...
Apr 17, 2020•2 hr 37 min
In a few days we'll be putting out a conversation with Dr Greg Lewis, who studies how to prevent global catastrophic biological risks at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. Greg also wrote a new problem profile on that topic for our website, and reading that is a good lead-in to our interview with him. So in a bit of an experiment we decided to make this audio version of that article, narrated by the producer of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, Keiran Harris. We’re thinking about having audio versio...
Apr 15, 2020•1 hr 4 min
From home isolation Rob and Howie just recorded an episode on: 1. How many could die in the crisis, and the risk to your health personally. 2. What individuals might be able to do help tackle the coronavirus crisis. 3. What we suspect governments should do in response to the coronavirus crisis. 4. The importance of personally not spreading the virus, the properties of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and how you can personally avoid it. 5. The many places society screwed up, how we can avoid this happening...
Mar 19, 2020•1 hr 52 min
To do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perhaps that's all wrong. If you took $1,000 you were going to donate and instead put it in the stock market — where it grew on average 5% a year — in 100 years you'd have $125,000 to give away instead. And in 200 years you'd have $17 million. This astonishing fact has driven today's guest, economics researcher Philip Trammell at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, to investigate the case for and aga...
Mar 17, 2020•2 hr 35 min
This week Oxford academic and 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord released his new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity . It's about how our long-term future could be better than almost anyone believes, but also how humanity's recklessness is putting that future at grave risk — in Toby's reckoning, a 1 in 6 chance of being extinguished this century. I loved the book and learned a great deal from it ( buy it here , US and audiobook release March 24). While preparing for th...
Mar 07, 2020•3 hr 14 min
The 80,000 Hours Podcast is about “the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them”, and in this episode we tackle that question in the most direct way possible. Last year we published a summary of all our key ideas , which links to many of our other articles, and which we are aiming to keep updated as our opinions shift. All of us added something to it, but the single biggest contributor was our CEO and today's guest, Ben Todd, who founded 80,000 Hours along wit...
Mar 02, 2020•2 hr 57 min
Today's bonus episode of the podcast is a quick conversation between me and my fellow 80,000 Hours researcher Arden Koehler about a few topics, including the demandingness of morality, work-life balance, and emotional reactions to injustice. Arden is about to graduate with a philosophy PhD from New York University, so naturally we dive right into some challenging implications of utilitarian philosophy and how it might be applied to real life. Issues we talk about include: • If you’re not going t...
Feb 25, 2020•44 min
nCoV is alarming governments and citizens around the world. It has killed more than 1,000 people, brought the Chinese economy to a standstill, and continues to show up in more and more places. But bad though it is, it's much closer to a warning shot than a worst case scenario. The next emerging infectious disease could easily be more contagious, more fatal, or both. Despite improvements in the last few decades, humanity is still not nearly prepared enough to contain new diseases. We identify the...
Feb 13, 2020•2 hr 27 min
The State Council of China's 2017 AI plan was the starting point of China’s AI planning; China’s approach to AI is defined by its top-down and monolithic nature; China is winning the AI arms race; and there is little to no discussion of issues of AI ethics and safety in China. How many of these ideas have you heard? In his paper Deciphering China's AI Dream , today's guest, PhD student Jeff Ding, outlines why he believes none of these claims are true. • Links to learn more, summary and full tran...
Feb 06, 2020•1 hr 37 min
Two 80,000 Hours researchers, Robert Wiblin and Howie Lempel, record an experimental bonus episode about the new 2019-nCoV virus. See this list of resources , including many discussed in the episode, to learn more. In the 1h15m conversation we cover: • What is it? • How many people have it? • How contagious is it? • What fraction of people who contract it die? • How likely is it to spread out of control? • What's the range of plausible fatalities worldwide? • How does it compare to other epidemi...
Feb 03, 2020•1 hr 19 min
You’re given a box with a set of dice in it. If you roll an even number, a person's life is saved. If you roll an odd number, someone else will die. Each time you shake the box you get $10. Should you do it? A committed consequentialist might say, "Sure! Free money!" But most will think it obvious that you should say no. You've only gotten a tiny benefit, in exchange for moral responsibility over whether other people live or die. And yet, according to today’s return guest, philosophy Prof Will M...
Jan 24, 2020•3 hr 26 min
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2018. Paul Christiano is one of the smartest people I know. After our first session produced such great material, we decided to do a second recording, resulting in our longest interview so far. While challenging at times I can strongly recommend listening — Paul works on AI himself and has a very unusually thought through view of how it will change the world. This is now the top resource I'm going to refer people to if they're interest...
Jan 15, 2020•3 hr 51 min
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in May 2018. Joseph Stalin had a life-extension program dedicated to making himself immortal. What if he had succeeded? According to Bryan Caplan in episode #32, there’s an 80% chance that Stalin would still be ruling Russia today. Today’s guest disagrees. Like Stalin he has eyes for his own immortality - including an insurance plan that will cover the cost of cryogenically freezing himself after he dies - and thinks the technology to achieve it ...
Jan 08, 2020•1 hr 25 min
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in January 2018. Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no place in civil society, that it was okay to kill illegitimate children, and that there was a ranking in the moral worth of different races. Throughout history we’ve consistently believed, as common sense, truly horrifying things by t...
Dec 31, 2019•1 hr 53 min
What is it like to be you right now? You're seeing this text on the screen, smelling the coffee next to you, and feeling the warmth of the cup. There’s a lot going on in your head — your conscious experience. Now imagine beings that are identical to humans, but for one thing: they lack this conscious experience. If you spill your coffee on them, they’ll jump like anyone else, but inside they'll feel no pain and have no thoughts: the lights are off. The concept of these so-called 'philosophical z...
Dec 16, 2019•4 hr 42 min
In 1989, the professor of moral philosophy Peter Singer was all over the news for his inflammatory opinions about abortion. But the controversy stemmed from Practical Ethics — a book he’d actually released way back in 1979. It took a German translation ten years on for protests to kick off. According to Singer, he honestly didn’t expect this view to be as provocative as it became, and he certainly wasn’t aiming to stir up trouble and get attention. But after the protests and the increasing cover...
Dec 05, 2019•2 hr 1 min
"…it started when the Soviet Union fell apart and there was a real desire to ensure security of nuclear materials and pathogens, and that scientists with [WMD-related] knowledge could get paid so that they wouldn't go to countries and sell that knowledge." Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins has had an incredible career in diplomacy and global security. Today she’s a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of Global Connections Empowering Global Change , where she works on glo...
Nov 19, 2019•1 hr 41 min
November 3 2020, 10:32PM: CNN, NBC, and FOX report that Donald Trump has narrowly won Florida, and with it, re-election. November 3 2020, 11:46PM: The NY Times and Wall Street Journal report that some group has successfully hacked electronic voting systems across the country, including Florida. The malware has spread to tens of thousands of machines and deletes any record of its activity, so the returning officer of Florida concedes they actually have no idea who won the state — and don't see ho...
Oct 25, 2019•2 hr 11 min
Today's episode is a compilation of interviews I recently recorded for two other shows, Love Your Work and The Neoliberal Podcast . If you've listened to absolutely everything on this podcast feed, you'll have heard four interviews with me already, but fortunately I don't think these two include much repetition, and I've gotten a decent amount of positive feedback on both. First up, I speak with David Kadavy on his show, Love Your Work . This is a particularly personal and relaxed interview. We ...
Sep 25, 2019•3 hr 15 min
