Sam Winter-Levy

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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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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

So definitely don't want to rule out the possibility of Windows emerging, and we can kind of come onto that later, but it remains a just very, very challenging situation where states are likely to be spending a lot of resources kind of staying on top of this problem.

Sure, yeah.

So in many ways, this is a kind of proven application to AI systems.

The United States probably already has large amounts of data from satellites, signals, intercepts, aircraft, and so on.

But that data currently kind of outpaces the ability of human analysts to digest.

And

States probably also have a significant stock of images of these mobile launches.

So many of them are just paraded in public through Beijing.

You can find images on the open source of these launches, along with information about their signatures and how fast they drive and their weight and so forth.

You could plausibly use these images and these signatures to train machine learning algorithms to just dramatically speed up the processing of intelligence to make it easier to conduct operations against these vehicles.

So in many ways, this is, like you said, this is sort of a classic

pattern recognition within a big dataset type problem that in many ways could be suited to AI.

And the key thing here is that AI can reduce the area you need to search dramatically and similarly reduce the area you would need to attack by orders of magnitude potentially.

Because just to kind of bring home what this entails, in most of the kind of modeling on this, the unclassified modeling, once you find these launchers, you then basically just bombard that area with nuclear warheads of your own.

So states only have so many nuclear warheads, so you have to kind of pick your targets relatively carefully.

And so if you can use these AI systems to kind of dramatically shrink the search area and the targeting area, it could possibly increase the possibility that you can pull off a splendid first strike with a nuclear first strike of your own against these remote mobile launchers.

Maybe one thing to take away just from this whole section is that although AI systems may make it easier to track submarines and to track road mobile launches, defending states have a lot of options that they can take to try to shore up the survivability of their second strike capabilities, or at the very least to inject enough uncertainty into the belief of a state that might be considering launching a first strike, that they're going to think very, very hard about doing so.

And many of those options available to them

do not require equivalent levels of technological sophistication.

Many of these are pretty low-tech measures to just massively expand the search area or massively increase the number of options you would need to target through things like making your launches drive faster.

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