Athena Aktipis

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1,334 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Jan

Athena Aktipis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

So I'm thinking of this on like the cellular level, right?

Like you can have epigenetic changes, right?

So if you go into an expression state or like if you're thinking about artificial life, if you go into some sort of aspect of like the running of the processes,

that maybe isn't exactly appropriate for the context because maybe the inputs got mixed up or maybe it went into an environment that was weird, then it could actually be, you know, in an expression state that's not appropriate for what would be most beneficial for the organism or the higher level entity.

And also, you know, in order to even...

kind of know what is going to be the best thing at the organism level.

There has to be a history of selection for those things that allow the entity to optimize for that organism level.

And if you have a rapidly changing environment, then it actually, you know, it's

not possible to anticipate every you know situation and what would be optimal for the higher level entity in that case so you know yeah if we could completely eliminate

errors of copying that would reduce the sort of, you know, problem that comes from mutations or alterations to the sort of underlying code that lead to, you know, cheating to arise.

But there's still other ways in to, you know, get things that aren't actually functional at the organism level.

And, you know, and if they're benefiting the entity itself, that's like in the weird expression state or whatever, then...

you can get the propagation of those things that are not ideal for the higher level.

Yeah, that's one way to think about it.

And I would just add to that that...

you know, information has to be processed at so many levels for anything to be able to happen.

And, you know, thinking about this at the cellular level, like to me, it really, it makes it much easier to, in a way easier, but harder to like wrap my head around, like how much information processing needs to happen.

And so even just the idea that, you know, we can say, okay, we're giving this AI, you know, a goal to, you know, do a specific thing.

In order for that AI to accomplish that goal, it needs to be able to process and respond to really complex environment.

You could say, oh, a cell, it has the goal of maximizing the survival and reproduction of the organism that it's a part of and the inclusive fitness and interdependence of whatever.

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