Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
In a way, it feels like my life's work.
It's the last 15 years of thinking about this question at 80,000 hours, and I've tried to distill all of our most central and important ideas into this one nicely honed package.
Thank you for having me.
The concept of the book ultimately is your career is the most important decision you'll make, especially for your impact on the world.
And if we're facing this crucial moment with AI, in a way, I actually think that's like even more important than ever.
Think about how are we going to use these years in the best way we can.
So in terms of what's happening, I think a useful thing to try and forecast is when will we have AI that can do AI R&D itself?
actually like many powerful feedback loops in ai but like the one that could be the most sudden is the algorithmic feedback loop which is if you get to the point where an ai agent can do ai research itself given the amount of computer chips we have in the world now you could like each company could run the equivalent of like maybe 10 million researchers which would mean that effectively the ai research workforce would expand by like a thousand times and
although they would still have a limited amount of computer chips, with that much more research capacity thrown at the problem, they should be able to speed up AI research a lot.
And so Four Thoughts, for example, have estimated that it's quite plausible you could see something like five years of AI progress in one year.
Right now, AI is actually, it's still quite narrow in what it can do.
It's like very good at...
multi-hour software engineering tasks but it's still a long way from being able to do most jobs and it still can't even like play pokemon better than most children but if you suddenly got to if we suddenly had another five years of like the last five years of progress in one year you could get to a point where suddenly something much more general much more like a true
digital worker, you could say, started to work.
And this would be like an AI that you could literally ask to do almost any job that can be done virtually.
Yeah, there'll be like these 100 million copies of Claude, which is like the whole, almost like the whole working population of the U.S.,
will be almost like this new, like a whole country's worth of people doing whatever those cloud things are doing at that point and able to think very fast and also able to act very autonomously.
So that's where you also start to get these like loss of control risks coming in and the more dangerous scenarios.
Like single companies might end up with a workforce that's bigger than the entire human workforce now, which could also like give those companies huge amounts of power.
And yeah, starts all kinds of novel risks and things to think about.
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