#189 - Nate Soares - Why Superintelligent AI Could Kill Us All

Nate Soares joins me to discuss the race to superintelligent AI, why alignment remains unsolved and why he believes building machines smarter than humanity could end in catastrophe.

Nate explains why modern AI is not programmed like traditional software, but grown through training processes we do not fully understand. We discuss AI escaping labs, recursive self-improvement, why today’s systems are only safe because they are not yet powerful enough to take over and why the danger may not be that AI hates us, but that it does not care about us at all.

We also get into OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI - the AI companies racing ahead despite the risks, why “turning it off” may not be possible, the case for an international treaty against superintelligence, and why Nate believes we should not give up before the driver wakes up.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - AI That Doesn’t Care About Us

00:01:04 - If Anyone Builds This, Everyone Dies

00:04:17 - If He’s Right, We Lose Everything

00:07:28 - Why Nate Isn’t Anti-AI

00:08:32 - From Google and DeepMind to AI Risk

00:11:00 - Why Can’t We Make AI Care About Us?

00:16:07 - We Can Look Inside, But We Don’t Understand It

00:17:20 - The Moment Nate Decided to Write the Book

00:20:24 - The Senator Who Already Understood the Risk

00:24:04 - How AI Goes From Useful to Terrifying

00:32:17 - Could AI Live on a Portable Drive?

00:36:13 - Are the AI CEOs Listening?

00:39:53 - Why Would We Accept a 10% Risk?

00:43:40 - Conor’s Point: We Don’t Get a Choice

00:51:10 - Are We Already Racing Towards the Cliff?

00:58:28 - The AI That Threatened a Reporter

01:15:53 - What Would Winning Look Like?

01:21:38 - What Can Ordinary People Do?

01:26:31 - Are We Just a Simulation for AI?

01:34:26 - Don’t Give Up Before the Driver Wakes Up

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CONTACT PETE

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