Binyamin Appelbaum

speaker

394 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 2d ago

Binyamin Appelbaum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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The Opinions · The Wild West of A.I. Needs to End. Here’s How. · 24 Sep 2026 podcast

We are one of the countries in which it is being developed, but not the only one.

And if we hit the brakes...

China will simply go ahead doing whatever it's going to do.

And we will fall behind in ways that could be bad for our economy, for national security, for our ability to set the agenda for global affairs.

And I think that feeling is quite acute in Washington.

And I just note on that point that The Times has reported that for President Trump, the fear of a stock market collapse is apparently a central element in his thinking about why this shouldn't be regulated.

I think there's probably truth to both things.

But I think as with the question of how much risk does AI pose to mankind, we're dealing with probabilities here.

And I don't think the probability is zero.

I think there is some chance that China has the ability to, you know, develop AI systems that would be more powerful than those, you know, the US has.

And so you need to sort of assess what is that probability and how dangerous would that be?

And, you know, I'm not going to give you a number except to say that I think it's non-zero.

And so I think it has to factor into these public policy debates.

What weight you want to put on it, I think, is a good question.

And I share some of your sense that it's very easy for companies to overstate this.

It's very useful for them to overstate this.

I think the real analogy with the Cold War is that we know that

you know, American weapons manufacturers and the American defense establishment routinely and consistently overstated the capacity of the Soviet Union for the purpose of justifying large scale expenditures on weapon systems.

And when we were able to pull back the curtain, it turned out that, you know, they had been lagging much further behind us than we appreciated at the time.

So is it possible that we would repeat that pattern?

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