Toby Ord

speaker

1,415 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Toby Ord’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 Aug 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

But I think of it like with COVID where I remember partly by reading some of your writing on it at the time, really tracking this early on and being very much ahead of the curve and really kind of looking at these graphs and working out like how many cases there really were and so on.

And overall, I would say this just bought me, like I was two weeks ahead of everyone else.

And so there were things that I was deciding, for example, to cancel my book tour for my going to America for my book.

But two weeks later, it was just totally obvious.

And like anyone would realize that you have to cancel it.

In fact, planes might not have even been flying at that point.

And so I think there's something here where for us to see now that in 2030 or something, that these systems could be extremely dangerous requires something of a leap of logic or something.

But to see that as we approach it will become increasingly obvious.

And so if we approach it gradually enough such that before they're at the level where they could take over the world if they wanted to, they're at a level where they could do other amazing things at a similar level to taking over the world.

And then before that, they're just a little bit below that and so on.

then it should be actually pretty obvious to people.

You don't have to look into the future.

You just have to look into the present, really.

So I think that we neglect that.

We think it's kind of a rare combination of things to really kind of take ideas seriously is needed.

But I think that that won't be needed.

And in fact, just the kind of natural, like with COVID, just the natural self-preservation instinct of...

I don't want to die.

I don't want my children to die.

You know, we'll kick in and we'll be enough actually.

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