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

Any system will struggle to continuously identify, track, and monitor multiple targets amid ocean background noise, especially as submarines get quieter and oceans noisier, which is currently happening.

The number of uncrewed underwater vehicles you would need to render even part of the ocean transparent is just going to be enormous.

Most of these vehicles have pretty low endurance, pretty limited in their covert communication range.

And if you wanted to deploy millions of sensors around the oceans, that's also going to be challenging, because if you want universal coverage, you're going to have to put some of those sensors in contested waters, which will incur risks of sabotage and interference of its own.

So, yeah, I think the first reason to...

think this is difficult.

It's just a hard technical problem.

Second, it's just unlikely that states are going to do nothing in response.

And this is going to be true for every element of this discussion here.

This is going to be a move-countermove dynamic.

And states have a lot of countermeasures they can use to tip the scales in their favor.

So they can jam signals.

They can manipulate sensor data with deceptive decoys.

For instance, they can just play recordings of a submarine into an amplified underwater acoustic source.

And states can also use a lot of these technologies to protect their own submarines.

So Russia and China, for example, can use these underwater sensors, they can use underwater networks to protect their submarines, which generally operate in waters closer to their own home territory, where it's easier to protect them.

I think there are just a lot of ways that states can add uncertainty to every step of the process of detecting, tracking, and targeting submarines.

And so it will likely remain a kind of probabilistic affair.

And states are probably not going to want to target their adversaries' nuclear submarines unless they're very confident that they can take them all out at once.

Because each submarine could carry as many as 200 warheads on them.

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