2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests

2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests

It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including:

  • Kyle Fish explaining how Anthropic’s AI Claude descends into spiritual woo when left to talk to itself
  • Ian Dunt on why the unelected House of Lords is by far the best part of the British government
  • Sam Bowman’s strategy to get NIMBYs to love it when things get built next to their houses
  • Buck Shlegeris on how to get an AI model that wants to seize control to accidentally help you foil its plans

…as well as 18 other top observations and arguments from the past year of the show.

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/best25

It's been another year of living through history, whether we asked for it or not. Luisa and Rob will be back in 2026 to help you make sense of whatever comes next — as Earth continues its indifferent journey through the cosmos, now accompanied by AI systems that can summarise our meetings and generate adequate birthday messages for colleagues we barely know.

Chapters:

  • Cold open (00:00:00)
  • Rob's intro (00:02:35)
  • Helen Toner on whether we're racing China to build AGI (00:03:43)
  • Hugh White on what he'd say to Americans (00:06:09)
  • Buck Shlegeris on convincing AI models they've already escaped (00:12:09)
  • Paul Scharre on a personal experience in Afghanistan that influenced his views on autonomous weapons (00:15:10)
  • Ian Dunt on how unelected septuagenarians are the heroes of UK governance (00:19:06)
  • Beth Barnes on AI companies being locally reasonable, but globally reckless (00:24:27)
  • Tyler Whitmer on one thing the California and Delaware attorneys general forced on the OpenAI for-profit as part of their restructure (00:28:02)
  • Toby Ord on whether rich people will get access to AGI first (00:30:13)
  • Andrew Snyder-Beattie on how the worst biorisks are defence dominant (00:34:24)
  • Eileen Yam on the most eye-watering gaps in opinions about AI between experts and the US public (00:39:41)
  • Will MacAskill on what a century of history crammed into a decade might feel like (00:44:07)
  • Kyle Fish on what happens when two instances of Claude are left to interact with each other (00:49:08)
  • Sam Bowman on where the Not In My Back Yard movement actually has a point (00:56:29)
  • Neel Nanda on how mechanistic interpretability is trying to be the biology of AI (01:03:12)
  • Tom Davidson on the potential to install secret AI loyalties at a very early stage (01:07:19)
  • Luisa and Rob discussing how medicine doesn't take the health burden of pregnancy seriously enough (01:10:53)
  • Marius Hobbhahn on why scheming is a very natural path for AI models — and people (01:16:23)
  • Holden Karnofsky on lessons for AI regulation drawn from successful farm animal welfare advocacy (01:21:29)
  • Allan Dafoe on how AGI is an inescapable idea but one we have to define well (01:26:19)
  • Ryan Greenblatt on the most likely ways for AI to take over (01:29:35)
  • Updates Daniel Kokotajlo has made to his forecasts since writing and publishing the AI 2027 scenario (01:32:47)
  • Dean Ball on why regulation invites path dependency, and that's a major problem (01:37:21)


Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Coordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore

Episoder(333)

#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

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#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models

#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models

OpenAI says its mission is to build AGI — an AI system that is better than human beings at everything. Should the world trust them to do that safely?That’s the central theme of today’s episode with Na...

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#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child

#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child

Lead is one of the most poisonous things going. A single sugar sachet of lead, spread over a park the size of an American football field, is enough to give a child that regularly plays there lead pois...

14 Des 20232h 14min

#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers

#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers

"It will change everything: it will change our workplaces, it will change our interactions with the government, it will change our interactions with each other. It will make all of us unwitting neurom...

7 Des 20232h

#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe

#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe

"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristics to them, even when they lack those characteristics. But we also have a tendency towards anthropoden...

22 Nov 20232h 38min

#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news

#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news

Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it?It's common to think that 'staying informed' and checking the headlines every day is just wha...

17 Nov 20232h 23min

#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures

#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures

"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts going back over time, is that really, the more of these experiments, the more labs, the more opportunit...

9 Nov 20231h 46min

#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down

#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down

"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people's homes, and instead of ...

1 Nov 20232h 57min

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