Nikita Lalwani

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191 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 10 Mar

Nikita Lalwani’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #238 – Sam Winter-Levy and Nikita Lalwani on how AGI won't end mutually assured destruction (probably) · 10 Mar 2026 podcast

Yeah, yeah, I do find it helpful to kind of reframe.

I guess the thing that feels compelling to me is like the stakes will feel so high for a country that feels like they could gain this decisive strategic advantage.

But they will also feel so high for the same country in terms of

Getting like the possibility that they get this wrong and then like they face this existential risk of a second strike that is much bigger than they hoped it would be, even though they thought they maybe had this splendid first strike capability.

So, yeah, I guess that's just yeah, that's feeling quite salient to me.

Yep.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

How should governments account for this possibility of fast takeoffs in the context of nuclear deterrence?

Yeah, I buy that.

It does seem from the bit of learning I've done for this episode that there's just like no dialogue at the moment, but that they do seem like incredibly overlapping kind of fields in this way that seems super important for people to be tracking.

Okay, so that's fast takeoff speeds.

So we've kind of talked about how one reason to think nuclear deterrence won't prevent one country from having a decisive strategic advantage is that AGI might threaten adversaries, secure a second strike.

But there are also people that argue that AGI could give a country a decisive strategic advantage without even having much of an impact on nuclear survivability.

So I think roughly the argument here is something like nuclear weapons as a kind of

technology that determine, at least in large part, some parts of like global balance of power are eclipsed by kind of faster, smarter, non-nuclear forms of power.

So I guess the question is like, is it plausible to you that a state with super intelligent AI could coerce its nuclear peers, and I guess non-nuclear peers, but through kind of economic or

or information or kind of cybernetic channels without needing to use nuclear arsenals?

Yeah, yeah, it does feel important to notice these cases where countries that are radically dominated economically are still just like completely unwilling to bend on the issues that are most important to them.

Okay, that was a lot, and it was all pretty heavy.

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