Rob Wiblin

So yeah, where would you think we should focus our energy?

Who else does it?

I guess Iran and North Korea.

Is there anyone else?

It's more like they have the latent capacity to very quickly make one.

We're mostly not going to talk about state bioweapons programs in this conversation, but how much should we be worried about AI enabling Russia, Iran, North Korea to create even more catastrophic biological weapons than they currently can or already have?

Deeply, deeply worried for a number of reasons, actually.

Hey listeners, Rob here with a quick announcement.

We have got a book coming out titled 80,000 Hours, How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good.

It's published by Penguin and written by our co-founder, Benjamin Todd.

It's a completely revised and updated edition of our existing career guide, which is by far the single most popular thing 80,000 Hours has ever put out.

It's now been rewritten to be useful to a wider range of age groups, including people making mid-career pivots, and just to include more practical advice in general.

It also has a big new updated section on AI covering both the risks and the potential to steer it in a better direction and how AI automation should affect your career planning and which skills one chooses to specialize in.

It's also got our updated research on global problems which has advanced a ton since 2018 and plenty of new illustrations to boot.

As of now it's available to pre-order anywhere you buy books and you can find it by searching 80,000 hours or clicking the link in the show notes.

Pre-ordering actually matters a lot for book promotion for some reason.

That's what they tell me.

The more pre-orders the book gets, the more it's promoted by retailers.

So if you ever plan to read it or to gift it to someone, if you go and pre-order it now, you'd be doing us a solid favor.

All right, back to the conversation.