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.

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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

Vietnam and over the Taliban and just suffered an unambiguous defeat in both cases after a couple of decades of trying to impose its political preferences.

So just this whole question of the relationship between technological power, political power, it's just a little bit more complicated than the most straightforward stories might imply.

I think it gets at the kind of underspecified nature of this concept.

It just kind of conflates a lot of different things in one phrase.

Yeah, so I think taking a step back,

The critical question here, I think, is likely to be the relative speed of two different quantities or two different properties.

The first is, what is the speed in calendar months or years at which AI progress proceeds and translates into advantage?

And the second is, what is the speed at which other states whose nuclear arsenals might be newly threatened adapt?

And so if the first of those, how fast AI progress is taking place, is faster than the second, how fast states are able to adapt, which could be the case either because you already wanted these kind of very fast takeoff odds that you just described, or because states are just kind of slow to respond because of bureaucratic...

bureaucratic reasons or political reasons or any number of other reasons, then you get these windows of vulnerability and instability with year-to-year fluctuation, which can be kind of particularly dangerous.

And I think a fast takeoff just kind of exacerbates some of those issues.

But even if AI progress is not so fast, as we've kind of discussed, if it kind of outpaces the ability of states to adapt, then you get these kind of dangerous windows of opportunity.

I think kind of one factor that kind of complicates this is that in the case of AI-enabled intelligence processing, US adoption of AI capabilities could be relatively invisible to adversaries.

So if it's just like you suddenly have a kind of discontinuous leap, or maybe it's continuous but just very rapid leap in the ability of states to use AI systems to process intelligence that they're already collecting, to process signals data they're already connecting,

then other states may not know that this breakthrough has occurred.

And so potentially you could get more kind of significant windows of opportunity that open up, as opposed to in the sort of industrial explosions where, you know, we're coating the ocean in underwater sensors and we're building massive missile defense architectures.

In that world, there are just going to be visible changes to the physical environment that other states are going to be able to see and respond to.

And that's, I think, I think that will likely give states more time to respond with countermeasures of their own.

Sure, yes.

I think even in these fast takeoff scenarios, some constraints are likely to remain.

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