Sam Winter-Levy

speaker

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

Sam Winter-Levy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Those are all moves that might shore up second-strike capabilities, but also increase the risk of accident.

And so that's also quite a scary world to live in.

Yeah, so maybe the question here is how important...

Even if you can't take out 100% of an adversary's nuclear arsenal, how important is it if you can get much closer to 100% than in the absence of AI capabilities?

I would say this is just an area of huge debate in the nuclear policy field.

I'm just going to gloss over a lot of nuances here, listen to the show, kind of read more about this.

But broadly speaking, there are kind of two views in the nuclear policy debate.

One view is generally dominant in the academic community, and this is the view that's associated with the kind of classic theories of mutual assured destruction.

And in this view, unless you have very high confidence that you can track and destroy all of an adversary's nuclear weapons, which they generally think is infeasible,

then the relative size of countries' survivable nuclear forces doesn't really matter.

So even if AI could help the US take out 90% of Russian or Chinese nukes so that it could sort of quote-unquote win a nuclear exchange, that's not super meaningful because 10% of Russian or Chinese nukes getting through is just still going to be absolutely devastating for the US.

And in this view, using these kind of AI capabilities to target other states' second strike systems is itself dangerous and destabilizing and sort of pointless.

Then there's a second view.

This view is generally known as the kind of damage limitation approach.

It's long been U.S.

government policy and received some support from the academic community, but more limited support there.

And in that view, it's generally seen as good strategy to deliberately hold at risk an adversary's nuclear forces in an attempt to limit the damage they can do to you.

In this view, there really is a huge difference between losing two American cities and losing 20 American cities.

And so they think that even if AI capabilities can't guarantee 100% success rate, maybe you can't pull off a splendid first strike in the sense of taking out every single Russian or Chinese nuke.

they do think that you can meaningfully limit damage.

Showing 261–280 of 361 · page 14 of 19