Rob Wiblin
speaker
5,091 appearances
15 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2021
last heard 6 Aug
Rob Wiblin’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 — 13 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Today, I'm speaking with Toby Ord, Senior Researcher at Oxford University's AI Governance Initiative and the author of The Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.
Welcome back to the show, Toby.
I think it's your fifth appearance.
It's great to be back.
It feels like today, everyone is talking about recursive self-improvement, or at least like everyone in my circles is talking about AI or recursive self-improvement.
Do you think that RSI will lead to an intelligence explosion or like a massive takeoff in AI capabilities?
What if AIs do get better such that they can more comprehensively replace the work that staff at the companies are doing?
Is that the crux of the issue?
If they could replace human researchers, like the full suite of things that the staff are doing, do you think then we would get an intelligence explosion?
What are the most distinctive aspects of recursive self-improvement that make it different than humans doing the work?
So I guess I think the companies imagine it now as a gradual process of replacing their staff, where it's gradually the AI is going to be able to do more and more of all the things that the humans were doing.
But I guess at the moment, the AIs and the humans are incredibly closely integrated.
They're working together basically as colleagues because there's lots of things that one can do that the other can't and vice versa.
What implications does that have that maybe shift people's expectations relative to... I think so much of this conversation has been informed in a way that people don't always appreciate by the Eliezer Yudkowsky vision that has been so dominant in, I guess, shaping, I don't know, the stories that people tell about how it's going to play out.
But if it's not playing out that way, why is it different?
Something that I find quite frustrating is it feels like, I guess, I and my colleagues have been thinking about this for years now, the request for self-improvement possibility.
It feels like we've gotten almost no greater clarity on how fast it's going to go and at what level it will plateau.
Did you also have that view that we just, well, we don't know whether it will work, we don't know how long it will last, and we don't really know on what level it's going to cut out or peter out if it does work?
Yeah, I guess I wouldn't want to, I mean, it would be quite a hectic year, I suppose, if we had like five years of like past AI progress compressed into one.
But I suppose it doesn't feel like it's impossible that we would be able to manage that.
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