Blaise Agüera y Arcas

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213 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’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 Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

And I think we do have to acknowledge that.

I'm not talking about AI apocalypses, etc.

I'm just talking about the fact that we are an advanced and in some ways fragile civilization.

And we have many, many means to harm ourselves given our great powers today.

I wouldn't say that it's not among my concerns, although I guess my versions of that probably look quite different from those of many AI doomers.

What's your version of AI apocalypse?

What do you think, if something's going to go really wrong, what do you think would be?

Well, AI can definitely be used to do really large-scale cyber attacks, bioengineering, etc.

There was just a story in the New York Times about huge numbers of synthetic drugs that have been killing a lot of people in the Cook County prison.

So that's a classic dual use sort of scenario.

The fact that we can use AI to make really large new numbers of drugs is great news in terms of drug development, but it has a dark side too.

And that's true of nearly every great power that we acquire.

And to be clear, the reason that I'm fundamentally more optimistic than some people I encounter is because I have come to the conclusion that intelligence has this very fundamentally social character.

Intelligence is prosocial.

That's how intelligence is made.

And so in that sense, the sort of fantasy of the evil supervillain, like, I always used to wonder, why aren't there more evil supervillains?

Why is that only a thing in cartoons?

And I think the reason is that there is actually an inherent pro-sociality in intelligence, and I believe that has already saved us many, many times over.

So that's why I'm optimistic, but it doesn't mean that we can't screw up.

A lot of people talk about using energy for AI in a way that implies that energy is a zero-sum sort of thing, that if it's going to AI, then it's not going to something else that is better for humans or something.

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