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 over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 3.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

You said that you thought in the picture that people have had historically, much of the risk came from recursive self-improvement.

Why is that distinctively risky?

And do those types of risks carry forward to the kind of recursive self-improvement that we might see in the next few years?

Okay, so that's the risk that stood out to people 15 years ago.

I guess, what's the picture now?

Is recursive self-improvement itself

risky above and beyond the fact that it speeds things up.

I guess I feel quite unsure about this, and it seems like people disagree at the companies and outside of them.

Imagine that it didn't speed things up.

I guess the obvious way that it's more dangerous is that the AIs are doing the work themselves, and so it's more difficult to monitor someone else doing something than to be doing it yourself.

Is there more to it than that?

I think people who are very skeptical that there will be any slowdown, the argument that they mostly lean on is just the competition between the US and China and the distrust between the countries will make it impractical to delay the arrival of things.

It's going to, if anything, inspire the government to want to push forward to superintelligence as quickly as possible in order to avoid being vulnerable to the country that they see as partially an adversary.

Do you think an agreement between the US and China is more likely than those folks believe?

So the game theory is a lot easier if both governments basically are extremely scared of superintelligence and they think the risk posed by the AI itself or the risk posed by AI advances is large relative to the risk posed by the adversary country that they're worried about falling behind against.

But I'm not necessarily sure that the countries will end up being as scared of AI to make such an agreement easy.

Yeah, the other pushback I get on this notion is, firstly, I guess if you talk to people who have done negotiations with China or been involved in that kind of diplomacy, on the US side, they're unbelievably jaded.

They feel like there's a lot of bad faith on the Chinese side.

It's very hard to get them to sincerely agree to anything and follow through on it.

And it wouldn't shock me if on the Chinese side, there's also some skepticism about the US's willingness to follow through on treaties.

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