Jasmine Sun

speaker

445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Jasmine Sun’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #248 – Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

And so then I go and ask, so why are you doing this?

Does that feel dissonant at all?

And you hear a range of answers to that.

I think that

So for a lot of people, for some people, I would say the probably more common belief among researchers at the labs is, yes, there are harms.

Yes, there are risks.

But if we really get this AI thing right, we are going to enter a world that is better than ever.

We are going to get the end to all disease because AGI is going to help us find the cures to diseases and humans will be immortal forever.

We're going to have all consumer goods and services be cheaper than ever because the space factories or whatever it is mean that like we're not going to have to pay for a house or a car.

Maybe it'll be better when the AIs can do all the jobs and we're able to live off UBI and we can sort of engage in these lives of infinite leisure and focus on our relationships and our communities instead of having to engage in like demeaning wage labor or something like that.

And this vision, I think, is genuinely inspiring to a lot of people who work in AI.

They do believe that technological progress for all of its bumps and disruptions ultimately leads us to a world where we live longer and happier lives.

And so I think one is that a lot of folks are willing to take the risk or sort of weather this near-term disruption in order to get to that future.

The other thing that I noticed though, which is in some ways a little bit more disturbing to me or challenging for me, is a pretty broad sense of techno-determinism.

So I think a lot of people in the AI industry and in tech more broadly do think that the path of technology is sort of preset, that somebody is going to build AGI, somebody is going to build superintelligence, especially at this point with how fierce the race has become between the frontier labs.

There is a sense of

well, if I don't do it, they're going to do it.

So maybe I'm at Anthropic and I actually am really worried that the thing I'm building might have all of these negative consequences.

But if Anthropic exits the race, OpenAI, XAI, Google, they're going to stay in the race and they're going to keep competing.

And then you might think, well, at least if I was involved, I could help make it go better.

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