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

Like, I think it's easy to underestimate how big the ocean is.

Like, the scale of the search problem here is just enormous.

Like, tens of millions of square miles of ocean that you're trying to find these relatively small objects in.

Second, as you said, water kind of blocks a lot of what we generally use to detect things.

So seawater is almost totally opaque to electromagnetic radiation.

So techniques such as radar that work pretty well for surface and airborne targets are just much less useful for finding submarines, which, remember, they can remain submerged for months at a time, potentially, when they're out on patrol.

Instead, states are generally limited to acoustic methods, but only low-frequency sound waves propagate significant distances in water, and in the process they interact with all sorts of kind of complicated oceanographic phenomena that distort sounds.

A lot of the ocean just contains a lot of ambient noise, and oceans are actually getting noisier over time with increased commercial shipping, and submarines just produce very low levels of signal relative to this background noise.

And third and finally, modern subs are engineered for silence.

So their propeller designs, their hull coatings, their internal machinery, it's all just designed to minimize noise.

And nuclear-powered submarines can be so difficult to detect from other subs that they sometimes collide underwater.

Exactly.

It's like really finding needles in a haystack where those needles are designed to be as difficult to find as possible.

And we need to find every single needle simultaneously at the same moment with zero margin per hour.

So yeah, extremely, extremely difficult search problem.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, so there's maybe two ways to think about this, and we can kind of bracket the first one and come back to that later, potentially.

The first one is going to be true of many of these different types of questions, which is maybe AI can invent things that we can't anticipate in advance, just like totally new methods that it's just very hard to think through now.

So we can maybe kind of come back to that set of answers.

Showing 41–60 of 361 · page 3 of 19